The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again

by Robert D. Putnam

Strikes became the workers’ weapon of choice in the struggle with management, and in the decades after 1870 America acquired “the bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world.”75 On neither side was this tussle a polite effort to seek compromise through collective bargaining. Both sides used violence—from the notorious street battles of the Homestead steel strike in 1892, to the equally violent Pullman strike in Chicago in 1894, to the anthracite coal strike in Pennsylvania in 1902. In 1894 Democratic president Grover Cleveland and his attorney general, Richard Olney, crafted a strategy to use court injunctions to break the Pullman strike, but by 1902 the Progressive Republican president Teddy Roosevelt appointed the Anthracite Coal Commission that ended the miners’ strike, giving de facto recognition to the union. Against the backdrop of fears among the “haves” of anarchy and revolution by the “have-nots,” mutualism and compromise had begun to win out over individualism and conflict, though it would be several decades before a new model of labor relations would emerge.