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

He preferred an ethnically mixed workforce of Germans, Scotsmen, Irish, Swedes, a few Welshmen, and “Buckwheat—young American country boys.” By mixing these groups in work crews, he avoided the ethnic disputes

By the 1890s, Carnegie had publicly distanced himself from the everyday running of his company. He presented himself as the businessman philosopher who had changed his responsibility from producing wealth to disbursing it for the benefit of society. He claimed that he, too, was a workingman; he granted the legitimacy of unions and attacked strikebreaking. Or at least this is what he said. His actions were somewhat different. He systematically undermined unions, increasingly pushed for reduced wages, and ultimately demanded ironclad contracts that would prohibit his employees from unionizing. When employees resisted, he resorted to lockouts, scabs, and Pinkertons.

Negotiations for the contract at Homestead began in January under the supervision of Frick. Carnegie went to Scotland. Frick built what his workers called Fort Frick: an eleven-foot fence topped with barbed wire and portholes that encircled the steel works. Frick was not interested in an accommodation. On June 28 he locked out the workers. On July 1, Carnegie consolidated all of his and his partners’ properties into Carnegie Steel. It was privately held and capitalized at $25 million, well under its actual value. He made Frick chairman.

Escaping injury was a matter of attentiveness and luck, but on a twelve-hour day in a loud and hot mill, attentiveness waned with the hours. Workers needed luck, and new workers needed it most of all. As wages sank, more and more of Carnegie’s workers were southern and eastern Europeans. Between 1907 and 1910, 25 percent of the recent immigrants employed in Carnegie’s South Works—3,723 in all—were killed or seriously injured. The company eliminated breaks in the workday that the unions had once secured; it apportioned work and set work rules as it saw fit. The death rate from accidents in Pittsburgh’s iron and steel mills nearly doubled between 1870 and 1900. The system was disastrous for workers, who became the equivalent of cannon fodder, but for Carnegie the profits were, in his words, “prodigious.”

It is hard to imagine as slight a piece of work as “The Gospel of Wealth,” written by anyone else at any other time in American history, achieving significant influence. It repeated liberal homilies at a time when they were going out of fashion and brushed aside any objections to the way the world worked with appeals to immutable laws.

Everything that antimonopolists criticized—“great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these”—Carnegie praised as “essential for the future progress of the race.”

Unlike Howells, who admired Tolstoy, Carnegie advocated a more flexible moral standard. He proposed not an imitation of Christ, as he said Tolstoy tried, but a new method that recognized “the changed conditions under which we live.” This was the new gospel, the Gospel of Wealth that threw out the old beatitudes and denigrated charity. In effect, it imagined a Christ fit for the Gilded Age, a tycoon, amassing a fortune and dispersing it all, but only to the worthy poor, “those who desire to improve.”

Carnegie knew his own fortune owed much to the tariff, which he assiduously labored to keep high; but he wrote as if tariffs, subsidies, and insider dealing were the fruits of evolution. His praise of Senator Leland Stanford, who founded Stanford University, as an example of how to disburse a fortune, ignored both how the fortune originated—like Carnegie’s, in public subsidies—and that the federal government was preparing to sue to retrieve the unpaid loans, which threatened to close the new university.

Carnegie imposed work rules that deprived his employees of virtually all their leisure; then he built a library and lectured them on how to spend time they did not have.

Union glassblowers mocked Carnegie’s claim that the library was “Free to the People.” Taxes had to sustain what workers regarded as Carnegie’s monument to himself. It, like the Pinkertons, was “a challenge to the manhood of free American laborers.”49

A sharp distinction between leisure and consumption was relatively new. It arose with the separation of home and male work, the changing nature of work, the American sanctification of the home and its domestic space, and the rise of temperance in particular and evangelical reform in general. In the workshops of antebellum America, work went on amidst gambling, socializing, singing, storytelling, debating, and drinking. Men wandered in and out of the workplace. As employers, particularly in the new factories of the Gilded Age, took greater control of work, they, as buyers of their workers’ time, succeeded in banning drinking and limiting socializing.58 Male social life and drinking gravitated to a new, largely working-class institution, the saloon.

The boycott was an old American practice. American revolutionaries boycotted British tea, white Southerners boycotted carpetbaggers during Reconstruction, and the Knights of Labor and its allies boycotted businesses employing Chinese in the West. By the Great Upheaval of the 1880s, the practice had traveled to Ireland, acquired new connotations, and returned with an Irish name. The literally thousands of boycotts of businesses in the 1880s had become public ostracism, which created an imagined community of consumers who exercised power through their collective consumption. In a world of widening markets and the mass circulation of newspapers and magazines, it could spread beyond a single target to take in those who patronized or supplied the boycotted business.

The new economists moved away from philosophical abstractions such as freedom of contract to what they regarded as testable economic hypotheses. In the words of historian Herbert Hovenkamp, they believed no one could prove that an economic “right” such as “an employer has right to pay any wage he and his employees agree on” actually existed. They argued for efficiency and believed that statements such as “minimum wage laws provide more efficient use of economic resources” were testable, verifiable, and “more plausible than doctrines like liberty of contract.”

Riis’s analysis was at war with itself. With his background in Christian philanthropy, he accepted and embodied the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. His emphasis on surroundings, however, stressed how the conditions in the tenements inevitably ground down their residents. His highlighting of the harm done to children undercut the distinctions between deserving and undeserving.

This was an argument that Walker would amplify and repeat until his death in 1897. It contrasted with his evaluation of black Americans. He saw their declining proportion of the population as a sign of their limitations to thrive outside the semitropical South and an inability to compete with whites. The logical corollary would seem to be that native-born whites could not compete with immigrants, but Walker instead employed a version of the old anti-Chinese argument.

declining birth rates in the United States were part of a larger demographic transition of declining mortality and, after a lag, declining fertility, which began in Europe about 1800.

Walker, in any case, was not as interested in the empirical problem of declining fertility and rising immigration as in the ideological problem: the arrival of supposedly inferior races in the United States.

Gilded Age New York—the ground zero for the new immigration—was a violent city, but it was growing less violent as immigration climbed after 1870. There was no popular panic over murder; nor was its decline due to draconian measures to suppress it. At least in the years before 1870, juries in New York City were reluctant to convict, and even more reluctant to execute, people for murder.

With elements in both political parties hostile to immigration, with liberal intellectuals and social scientists condemning it in the press, and with labor equivocal, immigrants needed friends. They found them among urban Democratic politicians, coreligionists, and those Americans whose families had come earlier from the places immigrants had just left.

Plunkitt was a more typical Tammany politician than Godkin’s thugs. He did not deny that he made money from politics, but he was sensitive to the Post’s and Parkhurst’s contention that Tammany was a collection of criminals who grew rich from protection money and bribes. That was what he called “dishonest graft.” He rose through “honest graft.” Honest graft worked the way corporations worked: it exploited insider information, used public policy for private gain, and relied on “friendship.” Plunkitt happily admitted what his critics contended; consciously echoing the Tammany Biographies, he claimed, “If my worst enemy was given the job of writin’ my epitaph when I’m gone, he couldn’t do more than write: ‘George W. Plunkitt. He Seen His Opportunities, and He Took ’Em.’ ” Tammany took care of itself by taking care of its friends. That was, he said, good politics and honest graft.

Neither Republican nor Democratic political machines were social welfare organizations, although they could be mistaken for them in hindsight. They were usually far more conservative than the voters who supported them; machine politicians had no ambitions to overturn the existing order of things. They were often fiscally conservative. In part they had to be, since legislatures restricted the ability of cities to borrow. In New York and San Francisco, the machines allied with local business groups that sought low taxes. They were, for a price, just as likely to protect landlords who exploited their tenants against code violations as to seek protection for the tenants. Often they would do both.

Cody and Spalding made the Wild West and baseball into missionary endeavors spreading American culture and virtue. They celebrated the democratic tendencies Godkin despised. “The genius of our institutions,” Spalding declared, “is democratic, and baseball is a democratic game.”

When the sports of the rich and middling classes intruded on the poor, they could make social tensions manifest. Cycling, which became immensely popular in the 1890s, was one of the few sports open to both women and men, but it was always a middle- and upper-class preoccupation. Six-day bicycle races at Madison Square Garden attracted working-class spectators, but because it demanded the purchase of a bicycle and a place to ride it, cycling largely excluded the urban poor, black and white. When urban cyclists rode to work on Wall Street, crossing through immigrant neighborhoods, they annoyed pedestrians and often hit children. Residents responded by creating obstacles in the streets and pelting cyclists with stones and garbage.

Employers often paid their female employees below-subsistence wages, regarding their pay as a mere supplement to a male wage earner’s income. Women without enough to live on had to do something. The something was, in some cases, prostitution, but prostitution, though paying twice as much as factory work, was dangerous, and the city also provided other kinds of less dangerous sexual service jobs in cabarets, dance halls, and theaters where attractive women could attract a male clientele.

Disproportionally native-born, female migrants came because cities offered better opportunities than rural areas or small towns. They were dissatisfied with the norms of patriarchal families for sometimes gritty and elemental reasons. They resented having to turn over their wages to their fathers, and they sometimes fell victim to violations of the patriarchal standards: assault from fathers, stepfathers, or other male relatives.

The press described Hull House as a charity, and Addams and her early associates as secular nuns or missionaries, but she regarded her work as an exercise in social democracy as well as the Christian charity embraced by the Social Gospel. Political democracy and the vote had proven insufficient in an industrial society, and the churches had lost the spirit of primitive Christianity with its imperative to love all men. The settlement house movement would restore both and would liberate not only the immigrants it served, but also the young men and especially the women who worked there. She thought of her work as using a female-dominated cooperative home to restore republican values to the city.

The success middle-class blacks desired for themselves and their children did not extend to far more numerous poor black workers excluded from segregated southern industries. Sarah Dudley Pettey, a leading spokeswoman for the striving North Carolina black middle class, highlighted the multiple fissures of American society when she praised black strikebreakers at Homestead as pioneers for a black industrial future. Like Booker T. Washington in a speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, she offered black workers as an alternative to striking immigrants. Pettey and other middle-class blacks, however, bridled at Washington’s willingness to confine virtually all black education to vocational education. She accepted class barriers; she resisted racial barriers. The South that middle-class black North Carolinians imagined would reward the “Best People,” both black and white.

Lynching and Jim Crow were, as white Southerners saw it, the centerpieces of Southern reform and race relations.

Homer Plessy was one-eighth Afro-American, as prosperous blacks were coming to call themselves, and he agreed to serve as the litigant challenging the Separate Car Act as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Tourgée’s argument revealed the turn that the Fourteenth Amendment had taken. An amendment aimed at securing racial equality had become instead armor for property and freedom of contract.

This was established by nature, not law, and the prejudice against black people was so deeply rooted and popularly held that no law could change it. The state could not force white people to associate with black people, but it could and must ensure that the facilities offered to both races were equal. It thus established the separate-but-equal doctrine, enshrining Jim Crow for generations to come.

Wells showed that in some cases the rape accusations disguised consensual sex, and in most other cases the original reasons for the lynchings had nothing to do with rape at all. Accusations of rape were, she wrote, “an old racket.” Her attacks struck at the core of the mythic South: the purity of Southern womanhood and homes threatened by black men.

Lynchings were more than executions; they were public spectacles, even entertainments, that often took place before large crowds. White men tortured black men, dismembering, castrating, and burning them. Photographers memorialized the murders. The photographs, turned into postcards, sold widely. As Wells asserted, rape had become a racial weapon; the mere accusation against a black man amounted to a death sentence.

Wells struck back by going international. With the help of British allies, she delivered withering attacks on Willard and American evangelicals who refused to challenge lynching.

Populists made the subtreasury a signature reform because they believed it would deal a deathblow to the Southern crop-lien system, stabilize farm prices, and inflate the currency. Even so, it too demanded not only government intervention but also political action from a movement that had sought to be nonpartisan. Charles Macune had introduced the subtreasury plan in 1889. The government would build warehouses, or subtreasuries, in the major agricultural counties of the nation. Farmers could deposit their crops there so they would not have to sell at harvest, when prices were lowest. They could borrow 80 percent of the value of their crops and receive certificates of deposit by paying 2 percent interest.

Blacks could vote, if they voted for Democrats in support of the planters whose land they sharecropped, of the merchants to whom they were in debt, or for the benefit of the men who employed them.

Bourbon Democrats had turned the tools Southern whites had forged to defeat Republicans and black people against white Populists. Populists—white men who had themselves killed and intimidated black men and endorsed electoral fraud—now often faced violence, intimidation, and fraud and sought to reverse them.52

To the parties, a candidate who would be a bad president was preferable to someone who would be a good president but a bad candidate. In any case, Bryce thought the country did not need brilliant presidents. Their power was limited and, with the country at peace, their duties relatively few. The United States could afford mediocrities. The 1890s would challenge that assessment.

Other strikes underscored the lessons of Homestead and undercut the Republicans’ appeal to labor. Silver miners in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, coal miners at Coal Creek, Tennessee, railroad workers in Buffalo, New York, all walked out. Three governors had to call out their state militias. Harrison could not stay above the fray; he sent federal troops to Idaho, where the miners had considerable local support, to enforce federal injunctions and to ensure the free passage of the U.S. mail. Democrats took advantage of the growing class divisions, fishing for workers’ votes.57 The 1892 Presidential Election Nationally, Cleveland doubled Harrison’s electoral vote and won by a plurality of four hundred thousand

Francis Bellamy, a minister, Christian socialist, cousin of Edward Bellamy, and the editor of Youth’s Companion, suggested setting aside Columbus Day as a national holiday (which would not happen until the 1930s). He composed the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States and “the Republic for which it stands” to commemorate the holiday and the fair.