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November 3 - November 3, 2020
The Knights grew because they had defeated Jay Gould, one of the most hated men in the country, and because they had renounced their vows of secrecy in deference to the Catholic Church’s ban on membership in secret societies. But they also grew because they had helped mobilize the West against the Chinese in what amounted to an American pogrom, and because they were preparing to expand into the South. Together, these developments had made them the most powerful labor organization in the country.
European socialists watching the sudden growth of the Knights were impressed, confused, and amused. Friedrich Engels, the coauthor with Karl Marx of The Communist Manifesto, regarded the organization, beliefs, and actions of the Knights of Labor as an “American paradox.” Their “immense association” represented “all shades of individual and local opinion within the working class.” Their constitution was authoritarian but “impracticable.” What united them was “the instinctive feeling that the very fact of clubbing together for their common cause makes them a very great power in the country; a
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At various times, the Knights distrusted Italians, Finns, Hungarians, and more, but the one racial or ethnic group they banned from the organization was the Chinese. The Chinese were largely wage laborers like themselves, but the Knights thought them quite different from other immigrants or freedpeople. They regarded them not as workers but as coolies, virtual semislaves who undermined free labor. Their attacks on the Chinese had as much to do with their popularity,
With the eventual admission of Washington as a state, Squire would be elected to the U.S. Senate on an anti-Chinese platform. All over the West the Chinese became more segregated, retreating into large Chinatowns—particularly in San Francisco—where numbers brought protection.
The numbers of anarchists and socialists remained small—they drew most heavily from German and Bohemian immigrants—but they were loud, provocative, and the favorite whipping boys of conservatives and a fearful bourgeoisie, whose own rhetoric could be just as bloody.
In 1879 the anarchist parade in Chicago drew forty thousand people. Few Irish were anarchists, but the bombing of the British Houses of Parliament and Westminster Hall in early 1885 by the Clan Na Gael, which drew significant support from Irish American workers, augmented the fears sowed by anarchist rhetoric. German immigrants made up most of the Socialist Party.
Between 1880 and the end of the century, the United States had three times the strike activity of France. Most strikes were over wages, but strikes by skilled workers were more likely to be about work rules and control over work. Control over work sounds abstract, but very often it was a matter of life and death.17 The unwillingness of employers to invest money in technologies or practices that would increase safety at the expense of profit was a constant source of contention between workers and management.
Industrial accidents annually produced greater casualties, although not higher death rates, than Americans experienced in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican American War, and the Indian Wars.
War, with its loss of life and injuries, was the metaphor of first resort, but in terms of death rates a better metaphor would have been childbirth. Industrial death rates hovered around those of women in childbirth. To maintain family and home, working men had paradoxically entered the zone of risk long endured by women.
Statistics are woefully incomplete, but between 1850 and 1880 the likelihood that American males between ten and fifty would die from accidental death rose by two-thirds, from 7 percent to 12 percent of total deaths.
The dangers of work rose in every industrial country in the late nineteenth century, but they rose faster and higher in the United States, where work was more dangerous than elsewhere and far more dangerous than it would be a century later.
Railroads, the symbol of the new age, provided the most dangerous work of all. American railroad men had a death rate of more than eight per thousand in the 1890s. This was not simply the nature of railroads; Americans were twice as likely to die on the job as those working on British railroads.
The daily struggles over who decided how work would proceed went to the heart of workers’ safety and self-identity as men. Miners, who could read the dangers of a badly ventilated mine, wanted to determine when and how they should work. Railroad workers wanted to determine when it was safe to run a train and how to run it.
Organized workers were fighting to set the rules of the game. They were often successful. Although statistics suggest that the success rate fell following the Great Upheaval, the sides remained relatively evenly matched. Between 1886 and 1889, workers won 44 percent of the strikes and compromised on 13 percent.
The armories of New York City were designed to overawe the working classes, but the state also funded twenty-six armories outside the city. In 1887, in response to the Great Upheaval the federal government doubled the appropriations to equip National Guard units, but the amount was still a modest $400,000.33 Governors eventually used the Guard to quell civil disorder 328 times between 1886 and 1895.
The ability of corporations and large employers to gain more and more influence over the courts and the ability of those courts to deploy force in support of private companies shifted the balance of power between workers and employers. Gould gambled that the courts would be on his side, and he was right.
There was a thriving native-born agnosticism in Chicago; it was, after all, the home base of the “Great Agnostic,” Robert Ingersoll, who was both popular in the Midwest and a leading Republican politician.
Despite their aptitude for arcane ideological quarrels, the lines between anarchists, socialists, and communists were not clearly drawn in the 1880s. Those calling themselves anarchists, for example, were not necessarily followers of the Russians Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, whose competing versions of anarchism came to epitomize the movement. Most anarchists embraced neither bomb talk nor propaganda of the deed, as terrorism was called. Their enemies collapsed the radical rainbow into a single hue, and the radicals themselves were not particularly clear about what divided one group
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Roughly twenty-eight hundred active anarchists and seven newspapers with a circulation of thirty thousand made Chicago a center of anarchism, which developed its own subculture and traditions. The typical anarchist was a skilled, relatively recently arrived, German worker employed in a small shop, not a factory, but there were some native-born anarchists, most notably Albert and Lucy Parsons.
The anarchists continued to regard eight hours as a meaningless reform since it did nothing to overthrow capitalism.
The anarchists wanted to bring Chicago to the brink of revolution, but all the bomber succeeded in doing was to make the city’s upper and middle classes believe that the city’s workers were on the verge of armed revolt and to countenance virtually any repressive act and the suspension of civil liberties. Richard Ely, the economist and advocate of the Social Gospel, would call it “a period of police terrorism.” The arrest of anarchist leaders and their subsequent trial became a cause célèbre.
In the wake of Haymarket, Illinois passed a conspiracy law making anyone who advocated revolution guilty of criminal conspiracy, and, if a court found a life was taken as a result, guilty of murder. They had written the verdict into state law.
Hay had married into money, a lot of money, when in 1874 he wed Clara Stone, whom he described as “a very estimable young person—large, handsome and good.”
That same year a railroad bridge over Ashtabula Gorge on Stone’s Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway collapsed. Final counts varied, but roughly 92 of the 159 passengers in a train passing over the bridge died. Stone had chosen the design against his engineer’s advice; the I-beams that buckled came from Stone’s Cleveland Rolling Mill, and the bridge had not been regularly inspected. The stoves in the cars were not self-extinguishing, as required by state law, and many of the passengers burned to death.
Reformers pushed against the bonds of the status quo, but when they broke those bonds their own lack of common purpose became all too apparent. They scattered, pursuing different targets. All complained about corruption, but the types of corruption they emphasized differed. Most complained about the advantages given the few over the many.
Pulitzer attracted an eclectic set of friends and allies, and George certainly fell within his spectrum of possibilities. Liberals despised Pulitzer, and his enemies attacked him as “Jewseph” Pulitzer, but the publisher, briefly and unhappily a Democratic congressman in 1884, counted Jefferson Davis as a friend and employed Roscoe Conkling as his lawyer.
A decade later the Astors, Stewarts, and Vanderbilts were no longer alone. The railroads, the rise of manufacturing, and the financial market created vast new fortunes. The consolidation of industries into larger holdings added lesser fortunes as those whom men like Rockefeller or Carnegie bought out found themselves with more than sufficient money on which to live and no further need to labor.
In what became known as the Bay View Massacre, Wisconsin’s governor had sent militia into the streets of Milwaukee against the advice of local officials during the eight-hour strikes. A Polish militia unit fired on largely Polish crowds, who had escaped the control of the Knights and the Central Labor Union in that city. The militia killed five people, including a child on his way to school and an old man standing in his garden. Authorities reacted by rounding up anarchists, socialists, and the entire district executive board of the Knights of Labor.
Our Country demonstrated the shift in the American conversation about race away from the advancement of black people to meditations on the racial destiny of Anglo-Saxons and the threat to it.
John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Collis Huntington, J. P. Morgan, Charles Francis Adams, and Marcus Hanna actively worked to eliminate competition, which they saw as ultimately damaging, and to insert a quite visible hand into the working of the economy. There was, however, a considerable difference between their attempts to order the economy and their success in doing so.
It was part of a larger trend of standardization and consolidation that created the standard time zones (1883) and the standard gauge (1886) to ease schedule making and the movement of cars from line to line.
Adams regarded government regulation as the necessary means for decreasing competition. Adams and Fink realized that unless the government legalized and enforced the pools, they could not succeed. The issue by 1886 was thus not government regulation, but rather the form it would take.
His decision to act on the tariff combined ideology and political calculation. He believed that the protective tariff allowed the government to manipulate trade, rewarding some interests and hurting others, which violated his liberal convictions of limited government and market freedom.
The tariff was the “mother of trusts,” a triumph of avarice over liberty; it concentrated wealth while the people were “sinking lower and lower in want, wretchedness, degradation and squalor.” It created conditions where “the millions own nothing and the few own millions.”
In 1880 the sixteen former slave states spent roughly $12 million on education. The former free states appropriated more than five times as much.
Although the percentage of illiterates in the country fell from 20 percent to 17 percent between 1870 and 1880, the total number rose from 5.7 million to 6.2 million. They were concentrated in the South, which had 65 percent of the country’s illiterates. In the South as a whole, 37 percent of the population was illiterate, with a high of 54 percent in South Carolina. Much of this was a legacy of slavery, since the rate of illiteracy among black people was 75 percent.
Proponents of the New South, recognizing the drag illiteracy placed on the economy and confident of their ability to control the appropriations, by and large favored federal aid. Opponents, however, denounced the bill as unconstitutional, defended state’s rights and common schools, and condemned the bill as a Reconstruction measure—a federal intervention aimed at helping black people. Northern Democrats recognized that the bill was a way to maintain high tariffs and opposed it. In the 1880s the bill won in the Senate, but remained bottled up in the Democratic House.
The Republicans had to fight tariff reform elsewhere, and they retreated to their preferred ground: they were the party of prosperity, and the tariff was the source of high American wages, at least compared to Europe. They equated even modest tariff reform with free trade, a doctrine of both the slave South and Great Britain, the great enemies of free labor.
The debate on the tariff had taken a surprising turn; it had become a discussion of American industrialism and the dangers of concentrated wealth. Politicians raised these concerns because they touched a nerve and captured the spirit of the times. President Cleveland had warned in his inaugural address that “corporations, which should be carefully restrained creatures of the law and servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
Although horrified by labor violence and an advocate of repression, Hayes thought “excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice and wretchedness as the lot of the many.” He framed the problem as how “to rid our country of the conflict between wealth and poverty without destroying either society or civilization, or liberty and free government.” Excessive wealth was “the evil” to be eradicated. Neither Cleveland nor Hayes was being duplicitous.
King signaled a cultural shift in which the Civil War became but an aberration from a larger history of westward expansion. Americans had wrested the continent “from barbarism,” through a “dominating resolve to found new homes where the conditions of nature were favorable to instant comfort and not too distant wealth.”
King hit on the great Gilded Age theme of homemaking, but just as John Gast before him, he fudged the considerable differences of American expansion before and after the Civil War.
The Republicans had subsidized railroads the West did not need. These roads carried more wheat than the country wanted or export markets could absorb, more cattle than the country needed, and minerals that it often did not need at all. Instead of a pastoral paradise of small producers, the West became a region of bankrupt railroads, wasted capital, and angry workers and farmers.
The federal government could push reform in the West more directly than elsewhere in the country because it had greater authority in the territories than in the states. It owned the public lands, and could also act with an impunity on Indian reservations that it could not employ elsewhere.
It was no accident that some of the first bureaucracies took shape in the West: the National Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which gradually took modern form as the older Indian Service sank beneath its long heritage of fraud and corruption), and the U.S. Geological Service. Mythologized as the heartland of individualism, the West became the kindergarten of the modern American state.
There is probably no greater irony than the emergence of the cowboy as the epitome of American individualism, because cattle raising quickly became corporate. Cowboys became corporate employees in a heavily subsidized industry whose disastrous failure demonstrated the limits of corporate organization and fed the reforms in land policy that emanated from Washington.
Texas longhorns were probably the three million worst-quality beef cattle on the continent, “eight pounds of hamburger on 800 pounds of bone and horn.” They neither fattened well nor were particularly palatable. But they had evolved to tolerate human neglect and to survive on the open ranges of South Texas. And they were fecund. Sufficient grass and benign weather allowed Texas cattle to increase to more than five million by 1880, a number nearly as large as the two next-largest cattle-producing states, Iowa and Missouri, combined.10
Angry, armed farmers and state quarantine laws meant that Texas cattle could not walk to market or move to farms where they might fatten on corn. Texas cattle had to move toward railheads outside agricultural districts so as not to endanger far more valuable domestic stock.11 The ticks produced the famous long drive. Longhorns walked the seven hundred or more miles from southern and central Texas to Kansas, going through Indian Territory, in order to get to the railroads
The subsidies, as with the railroads, were enormous. The federal government had opened up the public domain by evicting Indians, whom Roosevelt despised, and whose removal he saw as both inevitable and commendable.
The federal government provided Roosevelt and other cattlemen with free land, and nature provided the grass and water that the cattle consumed. The federal government and states subsidized the railroads that promoted cattle-raising and hauled cattle to market.
