George Edwin McNeill

Birth/Death:                             1837 / 1906

League Membership:             Faneuil Hall Meeting, June 15, 1898                                               Committe of Correspondence
                                               New England Anti-Imperialist League, 1899
                                               The Anti-Imperialist League, 1904-1921

Role in League:                      Honorary Vice-President, Executive Committee

Occupation:                            Labor Leader

Brief Biography

George McNeill was one of the foremost labor leaders in the country and certainly in New England. What was so different from McNeill's positions on labor was that they not only advocated greater wages and security for workers, but that they hailed a social reform that stemmed from the Boston Brahmin culture. His father was an outspoken abolitionist which influenced his son's take on social morality. The wage system was easily equated to slavery for McNeill who became one of the first to fight for the eight-hour work week. He was a member to many unions and labor organizations, including President of the International Workingman's Union, co-author of the constitution of the Knights of Labor, and co-founder of the American Federation of Labor. In 1886 he unsuccessfully ran for both the governorship of Massachusetts and the mayor of Boston as a Labor candidate. Anti-imperialism for McNeill was a matter of supply and demand of labor. Acquiring new territory threatened the labor market at home, especially those concessions that were so hard-fought. Ten million Filipinos would flood the market with overly competitive labor.

Primary:

George E. McNeill, Factory Children: Report (Boston: Wright and Potter State Printers 1875).

———,The Labor Movement (Boston: Bridgeman and Co., 1887).

———, Speeches Made at Faneuil Hall, Boston, June 15, 1898.

———, The Eight Hour Primer: The Fact, Theory and the Argument (1911).

Secondary:

Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Schenkman Publishing, 1972).

M. Patrick Cullinane, Liberty and Anti-Imperialism, May 28, 2009.

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