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“The strikers produced their own newspaper, the St. Louis Times, which attacked the voice of the city's leaders: The St. Louis Times jeered at The Republican's solemn warnings, quoting the phrase about the railroad men striking "at the very vitals of society": on the contrary, said the Times, it was "the very vitals of society' which were on strike, and hungry vitals they are too!" ”

“One commander explained, "Meeting an enemy in the field of battle, you go there to kill... But here you have men with fathers and brothers and relatives mingled in the crowd of rioters. The sympathy of the people, of the troops, my own sympathy, was with the strikers proper. We all felt that these men were not receiving enough wages." ”

“The strike gathered momentum because some militia units were loath to threaten lives. One commander explained, "Meeting an enemy in the field of battle, you go there to kill…But here you have men with fathers and brothers and relatives mingled in the crowd of rioters. The sympathy of the people, of the troops, my own sympathy, was with the strikers proper. We all felt that these men were not receiving enough wages"”

“The Great Strike of 1877 has been described as "one of the bitterest explosions of class warfare in American history." It reached inland to the great rail hubs and soon gripped the greater part of the North and West. Though it erupted three months after the ending of Reconstruction, the Great Strike did not come out of a blue sky. The employers had acted in a concerted fashion and counted on support from Washington”

“The state authorities also frequently allowed the state militia to be used as strike breakers. Although striking workers sometimes enjoyed public support, the newspapers and middle class opinion easily turned against them. However, it was an employers' offensive and an across-the-board 10 percent cut in rail workers' pay that detonated the Great Rail Strike of 1877.”

“The existing party system was difficult to beat because it adjusted to the threat of third parties either by stealing their slogans or by ganging up against them—as the Republicans and Democrats did with their joint slate in Illinois in the 1880s. Successful labor leaders were wooed as candidates by the two established parties. But both parties took handouts from the robber barons... ”

“The deal hatched by the Republicans and Democrats...sent the less popular candidate to the White House and allowed him to find jobs in Washington for a horde of displaced Southern Republicans. The press was full of reports of payoffs involving the award of railroad franchises... confirmed the scathing assessments of Marxists in the Socialist Party... bosses were using the two main parties as blatant spoils machines”

“the rumblings of class conflict split the radical Republicans, as some sided with the employers, others with the workers, some supporting the eight-hour demand, and others hos-tile to it. Then the postwar boom was brought to a shuddering halt by the crash of 1873. The wages of workers had been eroded by the depreciating purchasing power of greenbacks.”

“banks and the corporations should be taken into truly public ownership, and democratic institutions should ensure "the personal participation of each in the preparation, administration, and execution of the laws by which all are governed." But the state should not seek to prescribe how people lived: "Social freedom means the absolute immunity from impertinent intrusion in all affairs of personal concern...”

“A series of articles entitled "Man's Rights, or How Would you Like It?" explored the idea of women taking leading positions in economic affairs while it became the turn of men to be "housekeepers and kitchen girls." Other articles sought to reconcile a needed collectivism with the rights of the individual.”

“"This is the age of rights, when, for the first time in human history, the rights of all living things are, in some way, recognized as existing. We are far enough yet from according to all their rights, but we talk about them, we see them, and thought is busy to determine how best they should be secured." The Rights of Children," Woodbull & Claflin's Weekly, December 6, 1870”

“Marx and Engels, familiar with anti-Irish discrimination in England, readily agreed that special efforts should be made to win over the Irish workers. They may not fully have realized that in the US the Irish workers, especially the Pennsylvania miners, had been stigmatized as "copperheads" and traitors because they were believed to have lacked enthusiasm for the Northern cause. ”

“The German-American Marxists might have been narrow-minded, but still they were committed to the principles of racial and gender equality, though they soft-pedaled these issues when seeking to recruit bona fide wage workers such as the Irish of Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere who did not share these principled commitments, arguing that it would be easier to educate them once they had joined the IWA.”

“There was also the dilemma posed by the scope for social alliances. The workers needed to organize themselves as a distinct body, yet they also needed to reach out to potential allies-farmers, farm laborers, progressive members of the middle class, home workers—on a range of issues.”

“Marx and Engels were often uneasy at the narrow-mindedness of their American followers, but they were themselves partly responsible for this, since they had not yet developed a conception of the different character and goals of trade unions on the one hand and political parties on the other… because there had been no theorization of their distinct and different purposes the result was often confusion and tension.”

“For a brief span…the US sections of the IWA became the sounding board and banner for a diverse series of radical initiatives. The IWA and the National Labor Union were seen as sister organizations. The German American Marxists wielded what was then a very novel doctrine—the idea that if labor were only sufficiently well organized it would became a mighty lever for social advances, opening the way to… the oppressed.”

“The appearance of the labor movements encouraged the view that a fresh start could be made in the 1870s, with the emergence of new issues and voices. Racism, sexism, and conscious or unconscious bourgeois ideology continued to hold much of the population in thrall and to weaken progressive movements.”

“The dispute over this issue [women's suffrage] soon subsided, as most socialists and abolitionists did support votes for women. This cleared the way for new attempts in the 1870s to explore the makings of a progressive coalition.”

“The vulnerability of the black communities in the South also furnished an added argument for black male enfranchisement. The women of the North and West had certainly rallied to support the war effort and were shortly to gain the right for themselves to vote for school boards in Kansas and elsewhere. But whereas the racial order was at least momentarily disputed, gender divisions had not been challenged by the war.”

“The London headquarters of the International sent a warning in 1869 attacking both ill-founded rumors of war (between Britain and the US) and the all-too-real domestic threat to living standards: The palpable effect of the Civil War was of course to deteriorate the position of the American workman. In the US as in Europe… national debt was shifted from hand to hand to settle on the shoulders of the working class.”

“In 1867 a National Labor Union was formed to spread the eight-hour day demand. At its first national meeting the NLU declared: "The National Labor Union knows no north, no south, no east, no west, neither color nor sex, on the question of the rights of labor."”

“During the heyday of Radical Reconstruction Northern white workingmen made some gains of their own. The freed people were in a struggle for the control of space, both public and private; the Northern workers sought to control time. In this industrializing era the average working day lasted more than eleven hours. In 1868 Congress was persuaded to establish an eight-hour legal working day for Federal employees.”

“The Civil War had landed Washington with a debt of $2.8 billion… Schuyler Colfax, from Indiana, proposed… new taxes—a progressive income tax and a levy on the shareholders of the banks and the new corporations. Colfax pointed out that farmer had to pay a tax on his property, so justice demanded there should be a tax on capital—especially that of shareholders well as on employees and cultivators”

“As the Northern public became aware of the new President's gross indulgence of traitors and of the planters' resort to violence in their attempt to rebuild a coercive labor regime, support for the Radicals grew. Northern outrage at the presidential pardons and at the vicious racial revanchism of the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups led the Congressional Republican majority to support more radical measures…”

“With some charitable assistance, the Reconstruction administrations laid the basis for an educational system that was to comprise university colleges as well as high schools, open to the freed people and their descendants. The social programs of Reconstruction demanded resources that were in chronically short supply. Raising taxes alienated potential supporters.”

“The Northern public had been disturbed by white terrorism and so-called "race riots" (really ethnic cleansing), but it had little funded free legal counsel for indigent defendants.”

“Johnson believed that the freedmen now needed to be taught their place. He sympathized with the actions of all-white assemblies who enacted strict new labor codes, obliging the freedmen to accept work where it was offered and penalizing "vagrants." ”

“Confederate forces had melted away and the planter class was reeling from its spectacular defeat. But, paradoxically, local white power emerged in some ways stronger than before. Alarmed at the sight of free black people, former Confederate officers and men formed militia and patrols designed to … to deny land and hunting rights to the freemen, to ensure that they were still available for work.”

“emancipation of four million slaves, demobilization of three million soldiers, and the arrival of…new immigrants swelled the size of the most diverse laboring class in the world. Marx predicted that capitalist conditions would generate class conflict as workers were brought into contact with one another and discovered their common condition… But despite several attempts, no broad-based working-class party emerged…”

“In the post-Civil War era, the recently reunited United States was the most dynamic and soon the largest capitalist state in the world. No country illustrated Marx's ideas with greater precision and purity. Great railroads spanned the continent, and vast factories sprouted up, producing steel, agricultural machinery, sewing machines.”