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Dark, dank, and filthy, tenements were as antithetical to American ideas of the home as they were hospitable to tuberculosis, typhoid, dysentery, and other waterborne diseases.
the Knights of Labor formed the vanguard. An organization with 110,000 members in 1885, it numbered 729,000 by July 1, 1886,
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.
The Knights organized black as well as white workers, women as well as men, and unskilled as well as skilled.
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.
Americans had no real control over their southern or northern borders, and Chinese immigrants continued to pass across both. The incapacity of the federal government to enforce its immigration ban fertilized continuing resentment against the Chinese.
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.
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.
most conservative edge of the movement was the so-called aristocracy of labor. Peter M. Arthur, the head of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, proclaimed labor’s and capital’s interests to be identical.
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.
At stake in the struggle over the conditions of work was worker safety and well being.
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,
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.25
Railroads in receivership claimed the right to abrogate labor agreements and to appeal to the courts for the armed force to combat strikes that resulted.
Receivership provided the critical element in the conflict; without it, the federal government had less authority to intervene. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, passed in the wake of 1877 strikes, had taken away, for the moment, the president’s ability to deploy the U.S. Army in cases of civil unrest except when such use was expressly allowed by the Constitution or an act of Congress. It thus created a greater reliance on state militias to supplement the police and private guards.
the most critical interventions in labor unrest would come from the least democratic sector of the government: the courts, particularly the federal courts. 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.
Gradually, and with much internal conflict, the courts were interpreting free labor only as a worker’s property right in his labor. It was thus both a “natural” right and subject to the constraints on property rights embodied in considerations of Salus populi. Workers could withhold their labor in strikes or boycotts, but not if such actions infringed on the rights of other workers, harmed public welfare, disrupted the rules of the market, or illegally diluted the value of an employer’s property.
Through substantive due process, judges sought to use the amendment to enshrine freedom of contract, open competition, and laissez-faire in the Constitution even though none of these things had been part of the document. The courts made the amendment a means for ruling on the constitutionality of regulatory legislation that applied to business and labor by evaluating their substantive effect.
By making free labor virtually identical with substantive due process, the courts potentially made licensing laws, strikes, boycotts, the closed shop, and even some public health regulations the legal equivalents of slavery. Attempts by workers to organize a strike or boycott became a conspiracy against the rights of other workers who did not strike to pursue a calling as well as a violation of the new “right” of capital to a fair expected return on investment.
Judges increasingly regarded a strike, by definition, as a violation of natural law and public welfare and issued injunctions to stop them.
Chicago became the center of the Great Upheaval. The labor unrest there involved all the elements agitating working people in the mid-1880s: the surge of new members into the Knights (who embodied, more than any other union, the noble, if sometimes disastrous, stance that an injury to one was an injury to all), the contest over control of work, the dangers and deskilling involved in the spread of mechanization, and a renewed push for the eight-hour day. All had become political.
Labor demonstrations and strikes roiled Chicago in the winter and spring of 1886. The Central Labor Union staged some, and the Knights led others. To outsiders the wave of strikes and working-class marches and meetings in the spring of 1886 seemed a single uprising, but it consisted of two streams.
The rival factions often wanted nothing to do with each other. The two groups spoke different languages, sang different songs, hoisted different banners, and even flew different flags.
in the immigrant demonstrations the American flags were outnumbered by the red flag of socialism.
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,
August Spies, who in 1884 became editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the most influential German paper in Chicago, emerged as the city’s leading anarchist.
The rationale for the eight-hour day had evolved considerably by 1886. It had originated in free-labor beliefs in republican manhood and the worker as citizen: workers needed leisure to be fathers and husbands, to be informed citizens, and to educate themselves to be more productive workers. By the 1880s this rationale was overshadowed by a more complicated and paradoxical justification: by working less, workers would earn more.
To the alarm of some anarchists, employers in Chicago began to yield at the end of April: brick makers, boot and shoe manufacturers, some of the smaller packinghouses, foundries, picture frame manufactures, and more granted the eight-hour day. In the nation as a whole, forty-seven thousand workers gained the eight-hour day, some with and some without a reduction in pay.
Leaders of the movement called for a national general strike for the eight-hour day on May Day 1886.
By then the national tide had turned against labor.
On May 4 the strikes continued and employer resistance hardened. The rally at the Haymarket was poorly organized and smaller than anticipated; roughly three thousand attended.
Nearly everyone agreed on what happened next: a bomb sailed from the crowd and exploded amidst the advancing phalanx of officers.
The police said they came under fire from the anarchists. The workers and bystanders said that all the firing was by the police, who panicked, shooting not only into the fleeing crowd but also into their own ranks. Seven police died as well as at least five, possibly more, workers. Dozens of police and workers were wounded.
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.
the trial of the eight anarchists, including August Spies and Albert Parsons, for the Haymarket bombing. None of them was accused of throwing the bomb, although one of them, Louis Lingg, twenty-two years old and a recent immigrant, had manufactured the bomb thrown at Haymarket.
No one was tried for murder; the prosecutor accused the defendants only of conspiring to kill police officers at the Haymarket.
The Chicago anarchists were convicted of conspiracy in August, and seven of the eight defendants were sentenced to death. They were to die for what they said, not for what they did.
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.
Howells became the most noted and surprising advocate of clemency for the Haymarket convicts. He opposed “punishing men for their frantic opinions, for a crime they were not shown to have committed.” There was strong sympathy for the convicted among workers, but not all labor leaders joined the campaign for clemency. Samuel Gompers did, but Terence Powderly defended the verdict.
Oglesby thought the law required the condemned men to ask for clemency, and four of the seven condemned refused to do so on the grounds they had not committed the crime. In the end, the governor pardoned the two who asked for mercy. Lingg, unrepentant until the end, escaped the hangman; he committed suicide in his cell. The other four were hanged on November 11, 1887.
Hay had in many ways anticipated how the liberals would interpret the Haymarket trial. For them it was just an extension of 1877, and the anarchists needed to be suppressed.
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. All agreed that the spirit, if not the form, of older values had to infuse new social institutions and practices. Groups that had originally invested their hopes in voluntary associations, economic cooperation, and moral suasion recognized that their aims
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Reformers expanded their repertoires beyond direct action and propagandizing to lobbying and supporting individual candidates. To attempt anything larger—to do what antislavery crusaders had done, and gain control of a major political party, or form one that could contain a significant chunk of the electorate—seemed beyond them. No major reform party took shape;
Reformers continued to work through the two major parties, backing candidates in elections at the local, state, and federal levels and trying to hold them accountable. Reformers of all stripes—but especially evangelicals—made American elections more and more unpredictable.
In 1881 Kansas, despite its cow towns and cowboys, stitched prohibition into its constitution, and in 1882 Iowa followed suit. The Iowa Supreme Court nullified the amendment, but in 1884 the Republican legislature in Iowa passed a prohibition law that stood.
Temperance did not always involve nativism, but it often did.
When temperance and nativism overlapped, the combination could prove lethal to not only temperance but also antimonopoly.
the connection of prohibition and women’s suffrage, as her critics predicted, hurt the drive for the vote. Suffragists blamed premature prohibition measures in the new western states for the defeat of women’s suffrage in that region in the 1880s.
