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Page 2 of 2 During this time the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers was experiencing unprecedented growth. Under the leadership of its first full-time President, Frank J. McNulty, the membership grew from 9,900 in 1903 to 24,000 in 1905. President McNulty was born August 10, 1872. He was a charter member of Local 52, Newark, New Jersey, and an active participant in the early Conventions of the Brotherhood. In 1902 he was appointed Sixth Vice President, and elected Grand President at the 1903 Convention in Salt Lake City.
Several serious problems, however, started to surface within the union. Other large labor unions had adopted the concept of district councils; and early in the McNulty administration, the IBEW followed suit. In practice these councils, as they were constructed at the turn of the century, took power away from the international officers. At the same time, disputes between inside wiremen and outside linemen were intensifying.
According to American Heritage magazine, in an article by historian John Steele Gordon entitled “When Our Ancestors Became Us,” beginning in urban areas in the mid-1800s and spreading to telegraph, and mass-circulation newspapers all became commonplace. . . . Within those same. . decades the rapidly expanding middle class came to dominate American society.” Gordon called mid-19th-century America “practically medieval.” A generation later, he goes o to say, most Americans “were living the modern life.” And it was electricity which sped that transformation along. Although by 1908 a split had developed in the Brotherhood, which led to a temporary division of the union into two competing factions, the ties that bound the IBEW together were strong enough to prevail. The members, sidetracked into internal fights, were nonetheless tied together, linked in a common bond of labor brotherhood which could not break.
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1842 Commonwealth vs. Hunt states labor combinations aren’t illegal ( U.S.). |
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The Ninth Convention of the IBEW, held in Louisville, Kentucky, the fall of 1905, reelected President McNulty and elected Peter W. Collins as Grand Secretary. The two were committed to regaining control of unauthorized strikes, previously a persistent problem for the Brotherhood. Locals stuck to their agreements, and those violating the IBEW Constitution were punished. The McNulty administration tried to maintain the Brotherhood not as a loose collection of local unions, but as a centralized international organization bound together by strong international officers.
