Part One: The Tramp Printers: Union Vagabonds

perhaps for hosting the show The Beachtel Cast. Caitlin, how are you? I'm pretty good? Thank you? How are you? I'm okay. I've been driving all day and now I'm podcasting all day. I somehow I have two days today. Mm hmm, yeah, I guess I already asked how are you? I'll answer again. All allow right, all right, all right. Let's you said that you get to decide who is

sick and who is not. And that's a reference to when we were talking off Mike about how I've been a little sick lately and it's my responsibility to be so like just funny and good and charming on your episode today or I will stay sick. That will be punishment. Yeah, and so it's up to the audience to descernment. How funny, Caitlin, this is the worst and luckily humor is completely objective. That's true, so classically yeah, famously yeah, yeah, Okay, well,

I'll tell you what. Well, at the end, we'll let it'll be Sophie and I will decide how about that instead of as the audience, Yes, our producer, uh and fellow arboriter of illness and well healthy Sophie. Sophie, how are you doing? I mean, I'm doing well, and I feel like I feel like, uh, you know, Caitlin, who does have a master's integrating, we'll we'll do really well at um. I mean, I know you don't like to

mention it, but we'll do really well. I mean, I hate it, will do really well and making us go ah, and therefore will not have to be unwell, Okay, Like I feel I feel confident that because Kaylin has a master's screwding, that this is going to go really well for all of us. I mean, I've met a lot of people with masters in screenwriting and otherwise who are not good at making people laugh, So it's not. But what I mean is, yes, s freaking funny. That's good. Good,

I'm glad. So to considue our credits, our sound engineers Ian, and our theme music was written by the esteemable musician known only under the mysterious name on Woman, also under other names to friends. But so, Caitlin, you have a master's degree in screenwriting, is what I hear? That makes you kind of an expert on film stuff. And last time we had you on we talked about film stuff Max Shrek who Since that recording, we did a bectel past episode on Batman Returns, which famously has a character

played by Christopher Walkin named Max Shrek. The character was named after the actor whoa he discussed at length. I watched a nose ferato Since the last time I saw you, I watched and you did not watch Twilight, so you will not get Caitlin eyes jokes that still continues to be true now. Instead I had to watch like something like Okay, who's the the director who likes getting shot on camera and jumping into thanks full of cactuses and

making documentaries about how terrible the world is? Dead Pan Germany? Um, oh my gosh, his name he did Grizzly Man and stuff. Yeah, I think so, oh what is his name? I normally this is like a name I normally know in my daily life. Same. Uh it's um Oh. I am googling it because I have to know. I watched The Verner her Zog Knows ferrall too since last I really liked it.

But then I watched on The Devil's based on Aldie Huxley book, and like, this makes me sound like I'm very much like an old film buff, which is I'll pretend like it's true in order to get the cred and viewed as pretentious that that will allow me to have access to but every every all the other movies I watched this, Like last week, I kind of wiped away by The Devil's Um, it was really good m But this time we're not talking about film stuff. I just like having you on. Thank you so much. Today

we're going to talk about labor union Hobos. We traveled around the US on freight trains and later in r vs who were printers and printed newspapers. No kidding, I also have a master's degree in that, so I don't know this episode. Yeah, exactly master's degree in freight train writing. Yeah, excellent. So these tramp printers laid out a ton of the newspapers that did a ton of the political ship that made a ton of things happen in this country, lots

of good things and bad things. M They were the hard, drinking, hard fighting, hard cussin book reading, lonely road rail writing, short living, morally complicated and not boring tramp printers. All right, but first, have you ever heard of a printing press? I have heard of a printing press. Yes, excellent. Um, I gotta I gotta talk. In order to talk about

these people. I thought I'd be able to like cut right in, to be like and then they had a union, and then they did this off and then like slowly I realized that the like, the physical form of printing really ties into a lot of stuff about their culture. So we got a flashback to like, that's my guests for the date that a printing press was invented. Well, there might have been a printing press invented, but it is not when the printing presses we're talking about were invented?

Is the main European one. I think it's in my script, and so therefore I totally know it and I don't ever forget things, and like a whatever animal it is that doesn't forget things. Um, that's also a good bit. It's a joke. Yeah, thank you, all right. So on some level, printing seems like a chore that is just part of what we read, right, It's part of the

process of making things. But printing is really the core of media and mass communication, and like the origin of mass communication, without hands set type, there wouldn't be mass literacy, at least in the Western world. There was a good amount of literacy in the Eastern world going back a thousand years before Europe figured out how to read without using movable type, even though they had movable type. Whatever

I'm getting ahead, mhm. Europe was kind of a backwater of the world until people they're figured out that they could colonize everyone and be monsters. And movable type, like a lot of things, was first invented in what is now China, or I guess was China at the time too.

In the eleventh century, guy named b Shang mostly used porcelain, but he also used wood, and he made movable type with all of the different characters and stuff and it didn't really catch on at the time he invented it, and it was used for some stuff, but it wasn't like it didn't replace woodblock cutting m pretty quickly. Uh, some folks in China and some folks in Korea figured

out metal movable type started using it. Again, didn't really take off, basically, would block printing with whole pages carved at a time stayed the normal way of printing stuff. And there's lots of like reasons why this is. But like a lot of history that has to do with Western historians writing about Asian history, everyone's like, I'm not really sure if they're being objective or I'm not really

sure he's being objective in these histories. Sure, it seems like it didn't catch on basically because it wasn't necessary based on the way that typography worked and like the way that the written language has worked in different places. So for like a thousand years, the Eastern world was using woodblock printed books and they were doing quite well, while Europe was still scribbling away by candle light with quill and ink. And so once again that's how I

send my tweets out. It's quill and ink. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no that. Um, yeah, you know, I feel like at this point, tweets are probably about as long as I used to handwrite all my like fiction, no kidding, yeah, I I couldn't imagine doing that anymore. I don't know, because of a man named Johannes Guttenberg. I don't know if I said his first name, right. He was probably born around the year fourteen hundred. And I'm really annoyed because I was like, oh, I'm gonna do this deep

Divan Gutenberg for this part of this episode. He's really boring. Like, yeah, as far as I can tell, maybe some would have proved me wrong, but everything I've read about him not like the most interesting guy, one of the most influential figures in history, like kind of up there with like Jesus and Mohammed in terms of like pure cultural impact, you know. But um, by the mid fourteen hundreds, he was like, hey, guys, I've got an idea, and he

changed basically everything about the world ever since. Not necessarily for the better, because Europe no longer being a backwater has actually worked out really badly for everyone, right, but he certainly changed the world. Okay, As a tangent, I used to stay in the squat in Amsterdam years ago, and there was this, um, this little piece of graffiti that said changed the world, make it worse, um, and then someone changed it to change the world, make it

hoarsey instead of worse. But okay, nice anyway, I already know. And then I think about that one. I'm feeling really cynicals changed the world make it worse, which is what Guttenberg managed to do. Maybe I don't know. Whatever, I'm not trying to put a moral judgment on this particular character. He invented movable type again sort of in four it's like one or whatever date I said, right, yes, sorry, yeah, okay, well for now we'll go on the wrong one, the

one that I got off offers. Yeah, Um, I didn't ask you. I should have asked you. So historians like to argue about whether or not movable type found its way over from China or whether it was like invented whole cloth separately. Um. There's a couple other people who were like, no, I swear I invented at the same time over in the Netherlands. It just didn't like take off, right, And so a lot of people were like thinking about these concepts at the same time. And Gutenberg of force

also didn't like solely invented. He was working with a bunch of other people whose names are forgotten from mystery, who I didn't feel like writing into my script, so they will continue to be forgotten. And he still did a lot no matter what. He got an immovable type, and he also invented an alloy of lead, tin and antimony called type metal that was very good to cast type out of, basically like making you know, casting each individual letter so that you can print with it. Sure,

he developed really neat ways of casting type. He developed oil based inks that did a really good job of printing, and just like all around good job Gutenberg. He he took things further than anyone else had taken them as far as I can tell, mhm. And this time movable type. It takes off. Within a decade, it's all over Europe. You've got this massive explosion of media and literacy and

all kinds of neat ship. The most famous thing he did is in that fourteen fifty five or you know, before he even invented this, in he printed the Gutenberg Bible, which was the first type set Bible, which probably did a lot for people being Christians. I guess, I don't know.

The printing press first reached Mexico and the fifteen hundreds, it first reached what became later the US in early sixteen hundreds, when a woman actually started the first printing press in the United States, Elizabeth Glover feminist icon, I know, and like many medieval feminist icons or Renaissance femist icons or whatever, she became in charge of things through the old fashioned method of her husband dying. Her husband was like, we're taking this print and press to America, babe, and

she was like, all right, that's cool. And then on the boat over he mysteriously died. I don't actually think she murdered him, but I wish she had. That would have been more. I like that headcanon though, And so you know, he probably died of smallpox. Because it's the seventeenth century, right, So women have been involved in printing since the beginning of printing, basically before it was the US. The first woman editor of a newspaper was named Katerina Zanger,

who took over the business from her husband. And this time she took over because he was in jail for printing. Like pamphlets critical of the governor, and then later he died and so she became the first woman editor of a newspaper. Mm hmm. Western World gets ahold of the printing press and printing they did. And the thing that's really interesting is that for fucking hundreds of years, more or less than toil than eighteen eighties, the basic idea

of how printing was done didn't change mm hmm. Like it was a stationary and not entirely right. There was like different things people developed, but overall more or less like a mature technology for like four hundred years. Okay, you know, when it's not broke, don't fix it. Yeah, until whatever e eighties and then fix it. Yeah, and yep, Wow, amazing contribution, Caitlin. I'm killing it and being so funny and charming and hilarious. Yeah, you're totally going to get

your cold here. Thank you, Sophie get at left. I don't know why I were doing this bit where if you don't perform, you stay sick. You invent I know, but but why did you let me? I thought you were in charge? No, this is yeah, you're the arbiter of accountability. So interesting, not funny kitly. Oh no, I feel so sick. So the way that people sit type for hundreds of years, going back to Gutenberg, is that type setters would spell out each word letter by letter.

Have you ever seen a type case, like an actual physical object that holds type. I have no idea how common about I think in real life, but I feel like I've seen it in a movie, maybe at the end of like Little Women or something like that. Yeah. Probably,

you know. It's funny too to me because like, um, a lot of the like little like knickknack shelves that people have in their house, like the little tiny knick knack shells, a little tiny squares cut out of it or whatever, right, Like I think actually a lot of them are literally type cases wooden cases like trays meant for holding type. And certainly that that's an easy way to imagine a type case. And this is where upper

case and lower case letters come from. Is like literally the capitals were in the upper case and the non capitals were in the lower case. So you pull out a letter one at a time, and you put it upside down and backwards onto something called a composity and stick, which is a little stick that you can fit type into.

You do it one line at a time until it goes into an iron frame called a chase, and you fill everything, all the rest of it up with like blocks of wood or different slugs of lead and all this other ship in order to like fill it all up right to do the layout, and then that gets inked and printed. And some folks still do this. I got to do it once. I used to have business. I'm totally not pretentious. I used a business cards that

I like. Yeah, I use my friends letter press to hand set all the type on my fun And did that take a very long time. It's like I don't have the longest name in the world. I don't even remember. I mean, I didn't know what I was doing. And my poor friend had likes it over my shoulder and be like, now you're doing it wrong, like several times. Um, but I don't know. I didn't didn't take an hour just to lay out my name or whatever. You know. Yeah, I guess a business card doesn't have a lot of

text on it. Yeah, unless I get into like the Dr Bronner's style business cards or something which food for thought. Yeah, if someone hand me a business carden, it was like full of indecipherable, complicated theology. I would probably be more interested in what in my own fighting into my life. So the type setting is a nasty business in the colonial era, and actually for a long long time, presses were cleaned with urine to get the end lie and all kinds of off. You don't really want to hang

out with urine. I don't know, and I wish I did, and nothing I immediately read would tell me mm hmm. I don't know whether it's animal urine or whether like a lot of these printers drank a lot of beer, so it could have just been there urine, I don't know. In dark, unventilated basements is where you were working, they'd be like lit by like whale oil lamps or kerosene, depending on the era. Sometimes these rooms are a hundred and thirty degrees because of all the type molten crap

that they're fucking dealing with. Typesetters would hold lead type in their mouths in order, you know, in the same way that you hold a nail while you're being a cartoon character on a ladder with a hammer. So they're getting lead poisoning. They're breathing in piss fumes, it's hot, it's you know, there's flammable lamps. Yeah, getting knocked over, I'm guessing. Yeah, yeah, actually that gets us. That's guess

to someone I want to mention. In the eight hundreds, at one point um it was estimated at twelve percent of printers had had the symptom spits blood. M I don't know. He's just spinning some blood up every now and then he's like, oh, hold on, guess it's some blood up, which I've seen a movie. I don't know if you've ever seen a movie, but if someone is coughing there, they might die. If someone is spitting up blood, they are not even making it to the last act

of the film. They're they're already dead. And that's what I will get sick with if I'm not funny Enough's blood my hardcore band. So they contracted a friend of the pod tuberculosis at about twice the rate of everyone else, which was saying something because everyone else got a lot of tuberculosis and venture and the presses themselves were crazy dangerous.

Like at one point it was like like they would like eat fingers, you know, like because why it's just like you get your finger in the wrong way and like, whoops, it gets sliced off. Whatever. Sorry, I thought you were talking about the people who worked at the press and they were just just that's why the printers roamed as they needed new flesh eat. So it's like that movie. Um, oh my gosh, this would have been a good joke if I could have thought of the title of the

movie I just saw two days ago. No, klin are you coughing? You can't get the joke out. It's the Blood Bones and all buns and all. Well, that's a good name for a movie. I've never heard of it. Um, it's about like cannibal, like the early twenties cannibal people calling in love anyway, So you're speaking of the machine itself eats people's fingers, not the people. Are people probably not eating a ton of fingers, Like, can't say never sure, But you know what else won't eat your fingers? You

don't know that. You know what else probably won't eat your fingers most of the time. Approved is it the products and services you're about to hear about? It is? And if it's one of those true crime podcasts about people who eat people, then I was wrong and we didn't authorize it. Here's some podcasts. No, here's some ads, usually for podcasts. And we are back, Kalen. What do you think of those, um buying goods and services? Oh

my favorite. Yeah, they're so good, except for the terrible ones. Yeah, yeah, which is a lot of them. So the other ways that prints would die, uh sometimes they would dry the type like the ink over flame. And sometimes for some odd reason, drying ink on paper over flame would ignite.

Uh uh yeah, and so that wasn't very good. Um. And then my other weird self insert about printing into this episode is that I apprenticed as a as a printer for one summer once when I was bored, and and the first day I showed up Charles Oberbeck, who wrote the book Tramp Printers, which is a lot of what I'm pulling from. It's a very good book. He was like, you need to tie your hair back. If that falls into the machine, it will rip your hair

out of your scalp. So and that's the modern offset printers. That's not so. I don't know whether people were losing their hair or not. I can't speak to that part. I mean, if they're losing fingers, they're probably losing hair, Yeah, totally. So the life expectancy for printers from about eight eighteen five D was you want to guess this fun was it like thirty seven years old? It's so optimistic less, I guess probably the average lifespan that during that time,

let's thirty seven. So let's say twenty six, it was twenty eight years old. Okay, that's how long printers were lasting. Later they get unionized and we'll talk about that part of the story in a little bit, and their life expectancy went up dramatically, so much so that by the average printer lived to be forty one years Wow for them. Yeah, so printing was actually this very no future job. It was very punk rock in all of the negative ways, you know. Hell yeah, printing was fairly cheap all told.

During this time. With this style of printing, you could start a press without a ton of capital compared to a lot of other business ventures. So presses followed the westward expansion across the US as part of the great colonial project that they don't really have very many positive

things to say about. Often, mere days after a town or something would show up, ox drawn carts would bring hand presses out to the frontier, and some of which were up and running and like printing that town's newspaper before buildings were erected to house the presses. Because the presses are these like giant hulking industrial machine, not giant hulking, but like they're sturdy, right, sure you can. You can

have it out in the weather a little bit. And at least in the beginning of Paddington too, I've seen a printing press, yeah, totally. And I've know who Paddington Bear is. For those listening eight full twenty six minutes for Caitlin's reference Paddington And that is a new record, my friend. How long do you think it will take into my reference Titanic? It's right now. It just happened. We just well, we actually already talked about Shrekh, although in a different way to speak of the green ogre

Shrek who was also have that come up? Mm hmm. Anyway, So one of the other dangers of printing presses was that you could say stuff with printing presses very easily. And some people don't like it when you talk shit, but it's a very good machine for talking. Ship a lot of people started getting shot and stabbed over what they said in their papers, especially in the US Frontier, especially when they were saying stuff like maybe pretending like

you own people is a bad thing. So I don't know if you knew this, but the entire US had this whole big argument about that concept. At one point it got kind of violent. Yeah, yeah, I remember, I was no, I wasn't there. So take, for instance, Susan B. Anthony's brother. He was a newspaper editor named Daniel Read Anthony. He moved to Kansas and he set up an anti slavery newspaper because he wanted to, and that is a good thing to want to do and a good thing

to do. So he's our first named cool person who did cool stuff in this episode. Nice. His first week running that paper living in Kansas, he was attacked three times by pro slavery mobs, and that motherfucker he spent his life walking around with two horse pistols on his waist. What is a horse pistol, you might ask, I was just gonna ask, I had to ask. I asked the internet. Horse pistol is his old timey pistol that's so large that you can't comfortably carry it at your waist, you

carry it on your horse alongside the saddles. Just a big old pirate gun. And now do you think that when you saw that bit of graffiti in you said Amsterdam, and I said, like for originally it said what was it like, change the world make it worse? The world, make it worse, and then someone change changed that to said to say make it horsey. Do you think that's what they meant by make it horsey? Probably to introduce

some horse pistols. Yeah. It was actually a a big second pro Second Amendment movement in Amsterdam where they said we should amend things so that we can carry horse pistols. Very specific argument that they that they were making. So our guy, Daniel Reid Anthony he uh, he carried two of them at his waist, even though they specifically were designed for being too big to carry at your waist. And the two of them, I think, I think these are single shot pistols. Is like long enough ago, right,

I don't think that. I think that's why he is too. It's not so he's like dual wielding them anime style, but the whole thing has a very anime vibe of like two oversized guns mm hmm. He also got into arguments with other publishers. There was a rival pro slavery publisher who called him a coward. Daniel Reid Anthony, not being a coward, challenged him to a duel. I am not coming in one way or the other about the dual argument and masculinity and autonomy and all kinds of

weird ship. Sure, he told the guy h and shot him to death in the street and was acquitted at trial. I'm pretty sure his defense was we were dueling, it's Kansas, leave me alone. I feel like that was a valid defense back in the day. Yeah, during the Civil War, after he shot a one pro slavery guy to death, he volunteered and joined the cavalry, and so he probably was able to vent this point to start keeping his

horse pistols on his horse because using the cavalry. He later he gets out and he goes back to Kansas and he keeps publishing papers. A rival publisher shoots him in the chest, not in a duel, just ambushes him, and she was I know she was. People when you're dueling, consensual shooting. When you're dueling, you know what you're getting into. You're like, I might be shot. I might shoot someone,

but we're both it's two consenting parties. Yeah, well I think that that's what Kansas was a fine, that's consent state. If you're if you have an opinion pro or anti slavery in Kansas, you're consenting to shoot or be shot at the other side. Yeah. So he survives getting shot right next to the heart, and like everyone thought he was dead, and he was like, no, I'm not dead, I'm fucking Daniel read Anthony, And so he kept publishing a bunch of dangerous ship and another paper. During all

of this stuff. There was like he was not the only newspaper writer. It was like shooting and getting shots right all this He's just the one who I found most interesting. Another paper at the time wrote that someone should quote stuff and preserve a specimen Kansas editor before the race becomes extinct altogether, because they were all dying

so much. Who knew that between having to work in weird little basements covered in piss while you're spitting up blood and getting shot all the time for the rhetoric that you're printing, that it would be one of the most dangerous professions of the time. Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, like a real like rough and tumble job. And and one of the things is going to come up a

little bit later. But at the time, newspaper editors mostly came out of being type setters rather than later, once type setting became a less specialized craft with the additional addition additional machinery, more and more type setters were coming out of like journalism school. And I'm not making an opinion about this, um, but basically it was like we had to be a weird, rough and tumble type setter in order to end up being a newspaper editor for

a while. So they should make a movie about that anyway. And actually, yeah, like the Cowboys of the West, but

they're typesetters, type setters. Yeah, now these people like this is like why I like picked this topic because I had heard a little bits and hints because the person I promised underwrote the book about them and would talk about them sometimes, you know, and I would like to hear these little bits and hints of this like culture that I had no idea about, and no one I this is not a not to be like, oh I've uncovered this forgotten, but it's just like it's it's just

not the ship we talk about, you know, it's not within the specific mythos of like the wild West that people talk about. Mm hmm. So there was another enemy that editors and printers faced, which was capitalist exploitation, and I've heard of it. Yeah, yeah, I'm glad that this is a it's a relic of the nineteenth century. It's thank goodness it's no longer. They figured out a way to fight against that, and which brings us to some of the coolest and some of the well the big

one funk off on cool. Part of what we're going to talk about is their labor union done. That's my like clippanger even I'm about to go into it because at the end of the episode, thank you appreciate that we're going back in time again. The U S didn't even have a constitution yet. That would come next year, and it only had its name the United States of America for ten years. And so some printers in Philadelphia they were like, we're being treated like ship, and we

don't like it. And a couple of years earlier, some printers in New York have been like, we're being treated like ship. We don't like it. If you don't pay us more, we'll walk off the job. And the editors have been like, all right, well, here's some money. And so they tried to do the same thing in Philadelphia. They were like, we're being treated like shit. We want

a dollar a day. Because at the time, a lot of labors are getting paid by the day, and you have this like nasty thing that employers would do where if you're paying someone by the day, you hire them during the summer when the days are long, and then you fire them in the winter when the days are short. Yeah, And so the printers were getting that happening, and they were like, look, we want a dollar a day, and

they went on strike. Only they didn't use the word strike because it was so long ago that strike wasn't used in that context in the US. Yet it became a in case anyone was curious. It became a verb in seventeen sixty eight when English sailors struck, which is probably a reference to them taking down the sales, striking the sales. And it's likely that it didn't become a noun like a strike until a long time later. But

I don't know, I mean, I do know. I read some matemology about it, but I'm not sure entirely believe it. The thing I read claimed it wasn't until the eighteen hundreds that people used to the down, and but it was like what it was a verb like hundred years before that anyway, whatever, I know, you really came here for the amology of strike. So what they did they called a turnout, and turn out they did, and they won.

And this was America's first labor strike as America and um and it was one apparently fairly handily all right, nice, And so they start being like, printers are like, oh, we we stick together, right, And they already had kind of a guild model going on, sort of based on the craft guilds that you would have like the medieval guild system of apprenticeships and all that ship, right, And

but it's like unionizing started kind of coming around. They were like, we're going to form a union, and it started off informally, like a lot of good things do.

They agreed that they would never give up the right to strike, and they went for a long apprent They like coalesced and held strong this idea of printers would have a long apprenticeship program before they would like become guild members or union members or whatever, and they emphasized being like really good at the work and taking pride in a job well done instead of just like just

being laborers or whatever. They also worked for closed shops, basically being like, no, everyone who works in the shop must be a member of the union. They also worked to keep printing a sort of secret society which had actually been going on for hundreds of years. There's this whole weird, ironic and kind of interesting thing I want to know more about some point where with a history of printing in the Western world, most information about printing

passed by word of mouth rather than the printed word. Yeah, and that's irony. I know, I mean, I think it is. I got my brain got broken when two people told me when I was a teenager and they told me that lensmore SAT's song ironic isn't ironic, And so then I just stopped comprehending the word people to even have the capacity to understand what irony is. Yeah, I know, I'm I'm like, is this irony? I still don't quite know.

There was like a Freemason's but for like printers. Yeah, basically, wow, teenage Margaret's mind would have been blown, whoa, it isn't that ironic. Maybe I don't think it's probably not sardonic. I feel like I have a stronger handle on that, which is like sarcast. See I don't even know what sardonic means even a little bit unsick. Oh wait, grimly I'm not even joking about grimly, mocking or cynical. Well that describes me quite a bit. So yeah, you're fairly sardonic. Yeah,

I mean thanks, Yeah, wow, Okay. I was glad I had listened to beckdel Cast before I came onto beckdel Cast, because I was like, ah, I see this is the dry humor, which I really like. I really like dry humor. But thank you. Yeah yeah, so u s printers. They took this close shot mentality seriously and they distributed rat lists, which was that everyone who worked for too cheap um or otherwise betrayed everyone else, because if you took a printing job for less than the going rate, you funk

up everyone's ability to get that rate. So these were like the scabs, yeah exactly. And it was kind of before this came about, even before they were a union, I believe, so it wasn't even quite scabbing. Because they weren't necessarily like working on a place that was on strike. But just basically, if you were like working for cheap as a printery, you or a fucking rat. And if you taught non union workers how to print, you would

be ostracized, ship talked, or just jumped. And that actually will tie back into the really messy thing about all of this. Got it. Eventually they created the National Typographical Union in eighteen d two, which was the first national trade union in the US. And the union was so old school that it stuck to a bunch of medieval ship I think left over from it being basically a guild. The local union was called a chapel, and the chapel elected a father as the chairman, who is the most

senior member of the shop. Okay, what about a mother? Well, sound we'll talk. Actually this isn't the big route. They did let women in. But first, do you know who else has a craft or profession that they operate within a marketplace in order to feed themselves and other people and then advertise the things that they create on podcasts? I thought you were going to say, you know who else let women in? That's where I thought you were

going with that, the Highway State Patrol. Who oh yeah, I don't think it's advertised on this show in a very long time, maybe never on this one. No. Yeah, I we actually were able to get them removed. It just took an absurd amount of time and we had no power over it, and it made me very unhappy. I'm so tired. Well, all of the ads that you were about to listen to were handpicked by Caitlyn Durante. And if you have any problem morally ethically whatever the

difference who those two words is? Speaking of words, I don't know the difference between I use all the time. You can talk to Caitlyn Durrante about your problems with the ads that are now about to be her, and you can tweet at her at at I right, okay, yeah, that's okay, like oklahoma, not okay, like okay, okay, and we are back. Yeah. So your father was the most senior member of your shop most most of the time. Uh. I don't know whether or not any specific ones had mothers,

or whether women in that role called fathers. Anyway, the cool thing, I don't know if you knew this, but sometimes we're written out of history and they only talk about boys. What. I've never heard that before. Yeah, I mean that would be a massive Was that me being sardonic? I still don't understand quite now. I don't know mo being sardonic when you say that, I don't know, or am I being ironic? I don't know. I don't know.

We should ask the expert. What if one day we get just giving people the we don't know ironic, the we don't know? I think Caitlyn sardonic. I think Caitlyn is sardonic as well. I take that as a huge compliment. Yeah, it's intended you don't give me the ick, and I haven't seen you being ironic in the last four minutes. I'm gonna go with sardonic. Yeah, okay, cool passive illumination. Yeah, this is gonna be the thing that we get the most random Internet people giving us feedback on on anything

that's done on the shop. Yeah. Actually, sardonic means blah blah blah blah. Also, um, somebody some I'm like again at I write okay on Twitter, that is where you can send that feedback. Yeah, and if you want to get through I write okay spam filters, you have to um, the secret code is you look up the word pedant and then you put the copy and paste the definition of the word pedant into it. All right, which wasn't a slight at I right, Okay, it was a slight

about people who have a problem with Okay whatever. Anyway, all right, so all of this should have ruled all this stuff about the union, Like they sound fucking cool as hell, And I started off this episode researching and being like, hell, yeah, these people rule. Um. They did a lot of good stuff. They supported strikes, they organized legal defense funds, They built retirement homes for their union printers. They soon became the international type of epical union when

they started including Canadian printers. They struck for the shorter hour work day for decades. They lost the fight for the nine hour workday in eight seven, but they won the eight hour worked in nineteen o seven after organizing strikes all across the country, and this paved the way for other trades to win the same concessions. So they did all of this amazing groundbreaking work. They were one

of the first unions to let women in. Uh. They absorbed the Women's Typographical Union of New York in eighteen seventy one, and the logic they used makes sense. They were like, well, if we allow women into the union, then women won't be hired as scabs, you know, because they're with us, right And and most of what I'm talking about today, the most of the stuff that's woken into the history is mostly about individual men. But there were women there too. For a lot of printing presses.

Through a couple of the different decades that I'll be talking about, the majority of printers were women. Um, they were a minority of the tramp printers. They still did do that, but for a lot of well basically, women didn't have a fucking never have an easy time in the workplace, and so they faced a lot of harassment in the workplace. And so like randomly going to new shops all the time as a tramp printer meant exposing yourself to harassment on the road and meant exposing yourself

to a whole new set of people. Um, just like being a comedian, like a woman in comedy. Yeah, going on the road, everyone's being gross at you. Anyway, Well, clearly you must have been doing it in the nineteenth century, because now that would never happen exactly if you imagine it happening, you're wrong and incorrectly assessing the amount of

harassment that you're receiving. Yes, um, somehow I wish I knew what time they stopped using gas for gaslights, so I could somehow tight it in a little bit more efficiently, because no one got gasolate in the twentieth century because it was electrical. That's my joke. I'm desperately trying to make jokes as if I'm the one who's gonna get sick if I sucked this up. Well, you know what,

the tables have turned. Helen Torrante decides who lives and dies. Yeah, put that on a T shirt and well, so one thing that was cool by the women in the Union were given equal pay same as men hundred fifty years ago printing women in the Union got the same equal pay for white women. That's the bad part. This is the part that we're going to talk about. Here's where the story gets shitty. They didn't let black people into

the union. For a long time, I've run across conflicting information about this in a couple of books, like as best as I can tell. For the first very long time, at least for the first seventy years of the union, they either explicitly excluded black workers from joining or they have allowed individual locals to choose to exclude black workers. My this is the former, but I have read things that make both claims. Okay, the black author who have anything I've ever read by him for this show has

just been a fucking hit and it's like amazing. W. B. Dubois wrote about this in UM and this isn't a magazine that on the front says is union printed quote. I carry on the title page, for instance, of this

magazine the union label. And yet I know and every one of my Negro readers knows that the very fact that this label is there is an advertisement that no Negro's hand is engaged in the printing of this magazine, since the International Typographical Union systematically and deliberately excludes every Negro that it dares from membership, no matter what his qualifications.

And I feel like that really cuts it. What's really important is now the label union made means white, maide in this union that tries to be the union of printers in the entire country. UM and this is awful A ton of levels like one. It's awful because fuck them for not allowing black people into their union. Yeah.

And second of all, it makes everything they did that should have been really cool really shitty because closed shop unions are an important part of labor organizing practices right where you have to be union in order to work certain industries. If you're if your clothes shop union is racist, then it's systematically excluding people from entire industries, and it's not just any industry. Printing was the only form of

mass communication for most of this time. Of course, black folks printed anyways, just not in the I t U. And since the I TU tried to maintain a monopoly over print shops, that put them in conflict in the I t U s eighteen sixty nine and eighteen seventy conventions, this whole thing was angrily and fiercely debated, and uh a sizeable minority of people wanted to not be a bunch of fucking racists. They lost out, and they used a peculiar and shitty and hypocritical logic of how they

excluded black people. The first person who was specifically excluded for race was Frederick Douglas's son L. H. Douglas. He tried to join the Union, and the argument against letting him was, Look, this has nothing to do with race.

We're not racists. It's just that he's a rat, and we hate him because he was a rat because he had worked printing jobs because he wasn't allowed being the union, which was the inverse of this is exactly the argument that they used about why they let women in, right, because they didn't want women to be rats, so they let them in. And I really don't like this. It just makes me really angry. I like, I discovered this, like, um like three quarters of the way through researching the topic,

and I'm so angry. I'm so pissed off. It does really taint things. And I know that the national Organization did not pass a resolution um that some folks tried

to pass stopping racial discrimination. And I don't know whether or not individual locals lead in black people, because I know there were black tramp printers because a couple of them came up in the reading, but they were likely from the later the twentieth century incarnation of tramp printing, which was also through the I tu the the Union,

but it was a different time. And I can't find when the Union started letting black people in my guest is somewhere between the twenties and the fifties, because that's when most of the less radical American labor unions start to reckon with their racism. And I do know that they were like on the side of some splits within the labor movement that were like the good and less racist side of some splits in like the twenties and thirties.

And it's like, I feel like I like get punished for like I've all the other times I've talked about unions on the show, I've been talking about like the radical unions, and the radical unions were always like what the funk That union won't let put someone in based

on their race? Fuck them, you know. And I'm usually using these unions that are kind of examples of like when people are like, oh, everyone's racist the time, and be like not these fucking people, fuck you, you know, uh today, uh So anyway, whatever, Okay, So that's our our union. That seems really cool, but it's kind of

sucked up when you look under the hood. Yeah, And we're gonna talk a little bit more about the systems that they set up and how it ties in a tramp printing this is this is a real kill Joy strikes again our today with this particular episode. So if you're a printer, if you want to be a printer, and you're a white kid, you start off as an apprentice, he says. The whole thing is wildly old timey even

for its day. The apprentices get called printers, devils um when they're working in the chapel under the father Nothing. I love this language. That. Yeah, and you start at the age of like twelve, there's the youngest twelve, and you get called a devil because you start off in the hot and toxic casting room, which is where all the damaged type gets dumped into a quote hell box in order to be melted down and recast. Sorry, let

me back up for a second. They so it's this union that excludes black people number one, And it's also like child labor is awesome. What are you saying? Just checking just what I want to make sure I understand that, you think, Yeah, where you take the children and you put them in the room with the most toxic stuff. Yeah, yeah,

are they still cleaning things with piss? Believe? And actually one of the things that the union does a little bit later is someone develops like it was so excited that you were like yes, like is there pp cleaning products?

Good to know? Fantastic? At one point, I don't think this person in the script at one point, uh, the union like they often try to stop new technologies that are specific I mean a lot of the new technologies are specifically like let's break the union and by creating these new technologies that lets us fire a bunch of workers. And I think one of the technologies they stopped was a way to clean with like these like rolling devices that didn't involve hearing. In the union was like no,

we we want our piss um. That was probably the signs that they held up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and they successfully stopped that technology. So as a as a young printer's devil, Caitlin, it's your job to build up the shop fire in the morning, hall water, wash rollers and forms m piss yes, yes, with piss fold newspapers, maybe deliver the newspapers that her seems likely kind of blurry, seems to tie into the newsiest thing, and it's probably different in different place. I was gonna say, wow, there's

a lot a lot of tie ins. Yeah, you would also dis the type as well, which means you take they used letters out and you put them back in the case, which is how you learn the type cases so well, as you spend years just taking all the like when they're done printing, you just like take out

each individual letter and put it back. M hm. And the apprentices were hazed mostly in jovial ways, because the mean part of hazing was the job, you know, like hanging out in lead fumes and having a short life expectancy, like you're twelve, you're halfway done, kid um. The fun hazing was that you would like send them out for impossible task. This kind of ship still happens in offices and stuff like go find a left handed wrench, or check the case for type place, or go get a

paper stretcher which doesn't exist. Okay, so these these people have a sense of humor, I know, I'm noticing. They actually attempted to do it in an attempt to get me to spare their lives. So m and as an apprentice, you would be exposed to basically the two types of journeyman printers. The more experienced printers. There's the home guard who work in a shop day in and day out.

They get steady paychecks, they get steady work. They get that thing sorts of the p that you get at the end of your job if you have a job that isn't like my job, pension pension. And then there's the tramp printers, a huge percentage running from twelve to six in different years of like some books of like Charts and ship of It, of the union printers of the I T I TU. They would take out a travel card from the union, which was basically the right to show up at any chapel in the country and

get a job. And so some printers do that for a little while, or some people do it because they want to move from one place to another every now and then they're like, oh fun this job. I want to go somewhere else, and and or others the real tramp printers who just tramped, they're just fucking rambled, just going on the road, road road dogs. An apprentice would

see two distinct cultures. They would see two options in front of him or her, you know them if and basically, I like to imagine it's like you're a girl in a mid teens y a series. You know, um, you can pick between the home guard and the tramps. They're both fighting for the same team, the union, the white supremacist organization that m that loves child labor and piss yes. Then, after years of hard work, most apprentices intentionally apply at the toughest shop in town and go work there for

a little bit. To kind of close out their apprenticeship by like proving they can that done. They apply for a journeyman's status. Journeyman's status they joined the I t U and they get a travelers card. They get a set of clothes and some tools, and off you go on the freight train or the riverboat. Time to wander and put words into print, but that will have to wait until part two. Getting better at these cliffhangers, I think, mm hmmm, Caitlin, how are you feeling? I feel good.

It's because you were funny. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not spinning up blood. So there's that love that, Caitlin. Where can people follow you and or see your work? You can follow me on such social media platforms as Instagram, TikTok Yeah I do. I'm kind of I'm more of these like young hip people who's on TikTok now and um, you know Twitter, uh on live Twitter jk um and you can follow me at all those places at Caitlin Durante and check out my podcast that I co host

with Jamie Loftus called The Bechtel Cast. It is produced by a one Sophie Lichtman Hi and we analyze movies through an intersexual feminist lens. And guess who's been a guest. It's me Margaret kill Joyce. Oh my gosh. She's great. Yeah. Yeah, as she's kind of pretentious, well overrated, maybe a little bit sardonic, maybe a little bit ironic the second, but never gives any of us the yeah exactly, yeah, yeph Sophie. Do you have anything you want to plug? Uh just

act cool zone media and all the things. Yeah, I have anything to plug. Oh my god, Margaret, you have a new thing to plug and it's very very well titled go Yeah. Thanks. So I used to plug my old book, my boring book that came out in November. But um, I have a new book coming out in February. It's called Escape from Insul Island and it is available through the publishers Strangers and the Tangled Wilderness and you

can pre order it at Tangled Wilderness dot org. Um, and if you preorder it, you get a poster, and you also make the book industry, which is otherwise in trouble continue a little bit, because pre orders make the world go round in a way that I wish they didn't. And it's a fiction book. It's full of lies. You can't trust a word in it. Oh my gosh, who printed it? Though? Was it? Now? I wish I like

kind of. I don't feel great about the decisions that small presses sometimes have to make in terms of working with the printers that are not as ethical, well actually maybe about equally ethical, depending on what time period of I you were talking about. That's what I got. I will see you all on Wednesday. Goodbye, Goodbye. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts on cool zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.