The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

In Baltimore and Pittsburgh the violence unleashed by the strike brought the by-now standard comparison from frightened liberals and employers: the Paris Commune of 1871. They imagined communist revolutionaries in league with workers and the dangerous classes in an assault on free labor and property. The strikers, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote, refused “to recognize the right of every American to control his own labor and his own property.” Henry Ward Beecher condemned strikers for “tyrannical opposition to all law and order.” He insisted that a man with a family of five children needed no more than a dollar a day if he did not smoke or drink beer. “Is not a dollar a day enough to buy bread? Water costs nothing … the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live.” Even the New York World, controlled by Tom Scott, distanced itself from Beecher, calling his remarks “suicidal and the part of a lunatic.” In an attempt to explain himself, Beecher preached that it was the intention of God for “the great to be great and the little to be little.” The poor had to “reap the misfortunes of inferiority.”