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

Once the tariff eliminated British steel, and the steel companies’ control of patents limited new entries into the field, the major companies formed pools to allot production.

Carnegie got the lion’s share of sales because within this closed system he had the largest works. He ruthlessly cut costs. His goal was a small profit on unit sales with a large profit resulting from sales volume.

In nearly every trait but ability and ruthlessness, Henry Clay Frick, a descendant of Pennsylvania Mennonites, differed from Carnegie. Where Carnegie was congenial, Frick was dour; where Carnegie charmed, Frick glowered. Where Carnegie at least claimed beneficence, Frick threatened and carried through on his threats.

Carnegie bought a half interest in Frick’s firm, and, as it turned out, a full interest in Frick. It was his greatest acquisition. A preternaturally able executive and ruthless foe of labor, he restored Carnegie’s edge. When Carnegie fell behind in implementing new technologies, Frick bought the companies that possessed those technologies.

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.17 Carnegie’s workers died and were injured in shocking numbers; they worked twelve-hour days in brutal conditions, six and eventually seven days a week. They worked amidst open furnaces, molten iron and steel, unstable stacks of beams

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.”

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. He owned their days, but declared the meager time they had left between work and sleep or their bursts of unemployment to be “the key to … progress in all the virtues.”

What always haunted American leftists was the possibility that the achievement of democratic rights before industrialization had vitiated the struggle to attain industrial rights and power. Democracy, later analysts contended, had actually inoculated American capitalism against strong working-class parties, such as arose in Europe and which were devoted to both industrial and political rights.

Much of Taylor’s system remained guesswork posing as calculation, but he presented it as science, and as a self-publicist Taylor rivaled Buffalo Bill, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie.

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.

In Massachusetts the usual workday had shrunk to ten hours. The gradual decline of the working day and the limited space available to workers in their tenements and small houses, which left workers no room to entertain or meet friends at home, made the saloon a preferred site for male camaraderie.

The Irish and the Dutch, they don’t amount to much. For the Micks have their whiskey and the Germans guzzle the beer. And all we Americans wish they had never come here.

but the key was the combination of alcohol and cocaine, which worked as well in the South as it had in Europe and the North. Success did not last. The problem wasn’t cocaine, but alcohol. Atlanta banned alcohol sales in saloons in 1885, and Pemberton saw the writing on the wall. He changed his formula.76 The new formula emphasized sugar (a lot of sugar), caffeine (a lot of caffeine), and only small amounts of cocaine, a drug that would commandeer the name coke in popular language later in the twentieth century. Pemberton marketed Coca-Cola as a temperance drink.

Refocusing American unionism on wages and consumption rather than on control over work represented a philosophical shift as well as a tactical one. For different reasons but in a parallel way to academic economists, Gompers was rejecting central premises of classical laissez-faire economics.

At the bottom, predictably, were the Chinese and the Irish, who for Riis embodied all the social evils of New York: drink, violence, pauperism, begging, corruption, and crime.

The new immigration, he thought, had become a race to the bottom as Italians replaced Irish and then Jews replaced Italians. The result would only be a continuing deterioration of wages and the American standard of living.

Where once the United States had attracted the able and industrious, now it supposedly got the dregs of Europe. Steam had cut the costs of transportation, and agents planned the trips for even the most feckless. Walker complained that “so broad and smooth is the channel, there is no reason why every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe, which no breath of intellectual or industrial life has stirred for ages, should not be decanted upon our soil.”

The United States did receive the largest number of these new immigrants, but Canada, Argentina, Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia were also immigrant nations, even though they drew from a narrower set of groups with Australia embarking on a “White Australia” policy in the 1890s.

In the case of Poles, many of whom were incorporated into Bismarck’s Germany, or Jews living in the Pale of the Russian Empire, active persecution gave further impetus to a migration already under way. In Southern Italy, landlords squeezed poor peasants, producing first social rebellion and then emigration. Many came to the United States.14

Emigration was not spread evenly across the old country, and immigrants did not settle evenly in the United States. Statistics from the early twentieth century showed that most Southern Italian immigrants intended to stay for only a few years; the majority returned to Italy. The Italians and Greeks returned more often than other immigrants, but a significant percentage of many groups returned home.

Initially in the latter half of the nineteenth century, European countries relaxed their restrictions on emigration. In Russia violent pogroms drove out Jews, and even in the absence of violence Russia encouraged Jewish emigration and then taxed the emigrants. In the 1880s, Great Britain tried to dump the poorest Irish on American shores. In Asia, Japan relaxed its restrictions on emigration. By the 1890s, however, Austria-Hungary feared the loss of conscripts for its armies and cheap labor for its mines and estates.

In the 1890s real wages were falling. The birth rate among native-born Americans was in decline. Immigration had gone up, and the sources had changed to Eastern and Southern Europe. Steamships and economics of shipping had so reduced rates that Italian workers could get to New York more cheaply than to Germany.

But 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.

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.

Reliable statistics are sketchy, but roughly one in every three immigrants would go back home after 1890.30 Politics, however, proceeds on perception, and the panic over immigration drove demands for its restriction.

Change came gradually. Chief among the inspection stations was Ellis Island, which opened in New York in 1892. It became the port of entry for about 80 percent of the immigrants coming to the United States thereafter and was designed to sift the wheat from the chaff, separating out and deporting those immigrants who fell into the undesirable categories.

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.

Roman Catholic Church and organized Judaism proved effective in protecting immigrants, and the immigrants themselves turned self-help organizations into political organizations to protect their interests.

Immigrants transformed American Judaism, American Catholicism, political machines, popular entertainments, and eventually the character of the nation as a whole. The most dramatic changes took place in American Judaism.

The trickle of Jewish emigration from Germany, however, became a stream from lands farther east as roughly two hundred thousand Eastern European Jews arrived in the United States during the 1880s. They were culturally and economically quite distinct from German Jews, who greeted the newcomers with considerable ambivalence. Ultimately German Jews, alarmed by rising anti-Semitism, aided the emigrants, but they also insisted that, as the Jewish Messenger put it, “they must be Americanized in spite of themselves in the mode to be prescribed by their friends and benefactors.”

Some of the new Jewish immigrants arriving in the United States were Sephardim from the Mediterranean, but most were Ashkenazi from Eastern Europe, and their arrival distressed some Orthodox Eastern European rabbis as much as it did native-born Americans. In the words of one, the United States (which to many immigrants was the medinah or golden land) was a “trefa [food forbidden by the dietary laws] land where even the stones are impure.” As the rabbis feared, many immigrants came from those already slipping the bonds of piety, and the United States would tempt others to do so. There were immigrants who spent their days in a cycle of prayer and study, but they became a minority in American cities.

Eastern European and Southern European Catholic immigrants destabilized the American Catholic Church as thoroughly as the Eastern European Jewish immigrant shook American Judaism. The immigrants provided useful to the conservative, or ultramontane, elements of the Catholic hierarchy at war with the liberal bishops and clergy who sought an “American Catholicism” that reconciled the Church with American democracy and nationalism.

In 1890 Catholics constituted 68 percent of the churchgoers in New York and Chicago and 56 percent in Cleveland. In Boston, the heartland of American Puritanism, 76 percent of the regular congregants were Catholic.

Catholic, and to a lesser extent Jewish, voters were the mainstays of political machines. Political machine was a term Mugwump reformers popularized, and they equated it with spoils politics in general, but by the 1880s it had become the ambiguous metaphor for urban political organizations.

Organization better conveyed how urban politics worked. The foundations of the organization were in neighborhoods and wards, whose aldermen or city council members were drawn largely from among small businessmen.

When Parkhurst proclaimed that he had supposed the police “existed for the purpose of repressing crime, [but] it began to dawn upon me … [that] its principal object … was to protect and foster crime and make capital out it,” more people than upper-class liberals listened. Independent Democrats, Republicans, and nonpartisans joined rival Democratic clubs in a fusion ticket. Germans deserted Tammany in droves.56 One result of the election was that Theodore Roosevelt became president of the four-member police commission of New York City,

Writing in Yiddish in the Jewish Daily Forward at the turn of the century, he responded to a father who complained about his teenage son’s love of baseball: “They run after a leather ball like children. I want my boy to grow up to be a mensh, not a wild American runner. But he cries his head off.”

At the end of the Civil War, the words sport and sporting usually indicated something untoward. They referred to the activities of working-class toughs or dissolute rich men and the women, often prostitutes, who consorted with them. Sport was connected with gambling and saloons. The sporting life brought to mind pool, billiards, cockfighting, dogfighting, rat baiting, prizefighting, hunting, and horse racing.

Sport, particularly amidst the middle and upper classes, became a way to cultivate manliness, to overcome neurasthenia, and to demonstrate the will and character that earlier generations had supposedly developed through war or hunting in the wild.

But the idea of adding uplift and education to sport and popular entertainments could seem less a parallel development than a parody. Yet this is precisely what promoters of sports and entertainments proposed.

Baseball, Camp wrote, would free the American boy from the “taint of dissipation” and bind him by “his honor to his captain and to his fellows.”

Until the 1890s, however, racing was unusual in allowing racial integration at its lower and middle ranks. In the antebellum South the best riders and trainers had been slaves, and once freed they, alongside a new generation, continued to ride and train horses during the Gilded Age, creating a tight and prosperous community centered on Lexington, Kentucky. At least a dozen of the jockeys in the first Kentucky Derby in 1875 were black,

With the triumph of Jim Crow, black jockeys and trainers largely disappeared in the North as well as the South.

The best prizefighters in the 1880s and 1890s were Irish. John L. Sullivan, the heavyweight champion from 1882 to 1892, legitimized the Queensbury rules and became the most famous American athlete of his era.

it was a small gesture that pointed to a larger pattern: in popular culture the things often regarded as the most quintessentially American were most enthusiastically adopted by the children of immigrants. Baseball was the sport where the tangled ethnic, racial, and social tensions of urban American played out most obviously. Like virtually all other team sports, it was a male game, but it had a wide geographic and social reach. Indians enthusiastically adopted it. It was played along the Mexican border and spread across it. But mostly, particularly in its professional form, it was an urban game played and watched by all social classes, who could, at least for the moment, claim a larger identity through the team and the place it represented.

The WCTU supported Lizzie. Women reformers demanded a female jury, a jury of her peers. An ex-governor of Massachusetts served as her attorney. The trial turned on womanhood and femininity. The prosecution portrayed the accused as unfeminine, not a true woman and thus a potential murderer; the defense emphasized her dependence, her submissiveness, her true womanhood, and her Christianity. Her attorneys invoked all the tropes of female disability to rescue her. They got statements she made after her arrest excluded as mere hysteria; they explained away her odd behavior and flecks of blood on her clothes by citing menstruation. She did not conform to contemporary ideas of criminal types, most of which were male and none of which included members of the WCTU.

It took an all-male jury less than an hour to acquit her, to the applause of spectators. Even hysteria—the conventional diagnosis for unhappy and disruptive women—did not encompass murder. Lizzie Borden was not a member of the “dangerous classes,” and the working people of Fall River (some of whom were) thought she got away with murder.

Self-supporting women were “women adrift.” Like male tramps, they were workers detached from the home and thus defined as dangerous. Landlords preferred men as boarders or renters. They complained that female boarders used the bathroom too often and were more likely to cook or do laundry in their rooms, but they also suspected that their female lodgers and renters were “bad”—sexually promiscuous and not respectable.

She was part of a generation of women born between 1860 and 1900 who wed at the lowest rates in American history. This cut across class lines as working-class and immigrant women also chafed at parental control over their lives and earnings. Of those born between 1865 and 1874, 11 percent never married, and many more lost their husbands to disease or accident.23

Despite all the violence and repression of Reconstruction and its aftermath, the South in 1890 still held possibilities that extended beyond black subordination. North Carolina, a complicated Southern state, possessed a strong residual Republican Party, white in the old Unionist western part of the state and black in the eastern part.