by Hugh Brogan
Yet it would be a mistake simply to dismiss the Mugwumps as a parcel of snobs. Their criticism of late-nineteenth-century politics was based on unrealistic moral absolutes; but so is the Bill of Rights. They were, in fact, the spokesmen of the American conscience in their time; and given the intensity of the politics of conscience in America – the tradition of the Puritans, the tradition of the Revolution, the tradition of the abolitionists and the Union cause, all fused with American nationalism into the self-righteous belief that the United States was the ‘last, best hope of earth’, as Abraham Lincoln had called it in his high-priest vein – it is not surprising that the Mugwumps, if they had little power, had a great deal of influence. President Cleveland, for example, a slow, solid, honest man who came to the White House without much in the way of a programme, gradually adopted many of the Mugwumps’ pet notions, identifying himself with such principles as further civil service reform and economy in government; and over the years he made himself the rallying-point of all those Democrats in New York state who were opposed to Tammany. Another Mugwump victory was the widespread, and eventually universal, adoption of the secret or ‘Australian’ ballot, which thirty-three states had introduced by 1892. Previously polling-stations had all too often, and not only in Philadelphia, been scenes of the most flagrant violence and bribery; the secret ballot forced the machines to be more discreet in their operations and overall greatly increased the purity of elections. Finally, Mugwumpery was to benefit from the fact that this was the great creative era of American education. A system of free public schools was spreading across the country, where children were taught to idolize the stars and stripes and other tenets of good citizenship; old universities, such as Harvard and Princeton, were being reformed, new, innovative ones (such as Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore) were being founded; in all of them the young were taught Mugwump principles, a blend of idealism, nationalism, middle-class morality and personal ambition that was to leave its deep mark on the next epoch of American history. Eventually the great machines were to pay a ruinous price for ignoring the claim of conscience in American politics. The agents by whom it was presented were to some extent self-serving and self-deceiving. That did not help the machines.
Meantime it seemed as if an effective challenge to the status quo was much more likely to come from one or other of the groups outside the consensus. Not from the blacks, to be sure: they were steadily losing ground to the Southern segregationists, and were not yet numerous enough in the North to exercise any counter-leverage through their votes in that section, where public opinion was abandoning their cause in favour of reconciliation with the Southern whites. The Supreme Court, going through its dimmest intellectual period, found barely plausible constitutional arguments for upholding the racist legislation of the Southern states (only Mr Justice John M. Harlan upheld the Court’s honour by recording vigorous dissents from the majority rulings) and in the decision of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) adopted the principle of ‘separate but equal’ accommodations put forward as a justification by the state of Louisiana for segregation of railway carriages. The Court explicitly stated that state governments would have fulfilled their educational obligations to the citizens if they operated ‘separate but equal’ schools. This doctrine was damaging in several ways. By allowing school segregation, a practice based solely on racial hostility and contempt, the Court was legitimizing the said hostility and contempt, was endorsing the view that black was inferior to white. It was also entering into a conspiracy to deny adequate education to the blacks, because the Southern states had no intention of giving blacks equal facilities, even if they were separate, and the Court had no intention of inquiring whether they had done so or not. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Southern states spent more than twice as much money per head on the education of white children as they did on that of blacks. (The precise proportion was $4.92 to $2.21.) The courts were carefully uninterested in such information, and the phrase ‘the equal protection of the laws’ in the Fourteenth Amendment was reduced almost to meaninglessness. Finally, Plessy v. Ferguson damaged the education of Southern white children, not only because the school system reflected the worst prejudices of their parents, but because the cost of running two parallel systems, even if one was done on the cheap, was so high that neither could have enough spent on it.
Treated with ever-increasing rigour in the South, thrust into menial work in the North and, which was worse, treated as if they were invisible – their deprivation a problem which their white fellow-citizens refused to notice – the Negroes turned in on themselves. They followed Booker T. Washington. Their churches throve. And once more a solace was found in music. The spirituals were giving birth to the blues; in the bars and brothels of New Orleans and other Southern cities the movement was beginning that would soon give the world ragtime and jazz.
Another group which was largely excluded from the enjoyments of American society at this period was the new industrial working class. The difficulty in this case was intricate and peculiar. Nothing in the dominant political tradition allowed for the emergence of such a class. Even as late as the eighties there were still many who perceived their society only in terms of a contrast with aristocratic Europe: the United States was a working man’s country in the sense that everyone there had to labour to achieve fortune and respect; capital was simply a special form of labour. Immigrant intellectuals and workers who dismissed this view as sophistry, and said instead that America was developing a class structure based on divisions of labour, wealth and ownership, exactly like the European model, simply confirmed the old-fashioned in their view, for these new arrivals were patently subversive, probably socialist, and anyway not to be trusted. Besides, had not Mr Jefferson denounced European cities and their large, propertyless populations as sinks of evil – precisely the sort of thing that must never be allowed to pollute America? It was woefully true that in spite of the best efforts of the right-minded, cities had arisen, but since they were sordidly un-American nothing need be done about them. Most of their inhabitants were foreign, anyway.
Such were the liberal attitudes of all too many Americans of the old stock. They did not attract the workers, who by slow and painful stages had to train themselves in appropriate techniques for safeguarding their interests in the new age. Strikes were nothing new, and there had been attempts to organize working men’s parties as long ago as the 1830s; but it was only after the Civil War that a significant labour movement arose. Even then its progress was slow, irregular and uncertain, and must seem especially so to British eyes.
It is true that American workers were usually, in some important respects, better-off than their European fellows. Their wages were higher, their food was better; so was their clothing; so, frequently, was their shelter. And the American economy grew so rapidly in the period between the Civil War and the First World War, whether in population, production or consumption, that the demand for labour was buoyant, on the whole. In the late nineteenth century the deflation that followed the crash of 1873, coupled with rigidity of wages, which continued to be paid at traditional levels, meant that the workers’ real income steadily improved for about twenty years. As against these advantages must be set the diseases (smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid) which repeatedly swept the slums and factory districts; the appalling neglect of safety precautions in all the major industries; the total absence of any state-assisted insurance schemes against injury, old age or premature death; the determination of employers to get their labour as cheap as possible, which meant, in practice, the common use of under-paid women and under-age children; and general indifference to the problems of unemployment, for it was still the universal belief that in America there was always work, and the chance of bettering himself, for any willing man. A more subtle grievance was the slow degeneration of the working man’s status: as new wealth produced new classes the labourers felt that they were losing the dignity and influence, if not the power, which they had formerly enjoyed as equal American democrats. All
these problems were real enough and grave enough to make the emergence of a strong union movement likely, and as time went on other problems were added to them. But the unions never, from beginning to end of the Age of Gold, came near to realizing their potential.
The root reason was the extreme heterogeneity of the American workforce. It was divided, like the British, into an ‘aristocracy’ of skilled craftsmen and a mass of comparatively unskilled hands. But it was also divided by several American peculiarities: for example, sectionalism. In the East, where conditions had long been settled and the Industrial Revolution had brought, as well as its factories, mills and foundries, European ideas of class-consciousness, job identification and joint action might thrive, but in the West the old, undifferentiated America still flourished. There, a man might move easily from job to job – might be a miner one year and a farmer the next; and his relations with his employers were likely to be as informal, occasionally as violent, as any other social relation on the frontier. There could be little common ground between such a man and a steelworker in Pittsburgh. Westerners wanted to form broad alliances of the discontented to agitate for general improvement; Eastern workers were much more interested in evolving exclusive working-class organizations to concentrate on working-class wrongs. Then, there was racial prejudice. North and South, the black was universally snubbed and slighted. He was certainly not welcomed by the emergent craft unions. No wonder, then, that he had no objection to being used as a strike-breaker when the opportunity arose. The white workers had never shown any solidarity with him: why should he show any with them? The immigrants in many cases felt the same. Those of them, particularly, who belonged to the ‘new immigration’ – Poles, Jews, Italians, etc. – had little experience of industrial labour, and none of the English language. They received, at best, a cool welcome from the labour aristocracy. So they too let themselves be used as strike-breakers by big business and accepted wage-rates that undercut union demands; and even when, in due course, they understood the need for unionization, they tended to form their own unions and in some cases to monopolize certain trades. This did nothing to help the cause and spirit of working-class unity.4
It should also be borne in mind that the industrial working class never formed a majority of the American population. For most of the nineteenth century the farmers were the majority; and even when that ceased to be true, the numerical ascendancy passed, not to the blue-collar workers, but to the vast amorphous group that must, I suppose, be called the middle class.
Organized labour thus operated from a weak basis, as was amply demonstrated, again and again, during the post-reconstruction years. Attempts to wrest some concessions from the mine-owners in western Pennsylvania through a secret society, mostly Irish, known as the Molly Maguires, failed when ten of the leaders were hanged for murder and conspiracy in 1876. The evidence against them was provided by an undercover agent employed by Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, a sinister body which got its start during the Civil War and subsequently became the industrialists’ secret police, furnishing spies, gunmen and strike-breakers on demand. (The Pinkerton tradition was to prove all too durable, and was influential in the founding conception of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, set up in 1908.) The year 1877 was one of great railroad strikes, which culminated in ferocious riots in Pittsburgh that lasted for three days, caused twenty-six deaths and did 85,000,000 worth of damage to property. The workers were totally defeated and turned away from the union idea in search of allies. They gave support to the Greenback party, which had come into being in protest against the return to the gold standard and was popular in frontier regions which now, as so often in the past – in colonial Massachusetts, in Jacksonian Tennessee – hoped to find economic salvation in an inflated paper currency: in this case, the Civil War paper dollars, or ‘greenbacks’. But the proposed remedy was too remote from the real problems of both farmers and workers to serve for long as the basis for an effective movement, and although the Greenback party won over a million votes in the Congressional elections of 1878, it fell to pieces almost immediately when the Hayes administration in January 1879 announced that greenbacks would henceforward be convertible at face value into gold. It would no longer be of any advantage to borrow gold and repay in paper.
Much more promising was the association known as the Order of the Knights of Labor, which rose rapidly to fame in the early eighties. As it evolved under the guidance of its Grand Master Workman, Terence V. Powderly (1849–1924), the Order was an attempt to solve the new problems of social relations in accordance with traditional American notions, sidestepping both unionism and socialism. Originally it borrowed a good many organizational features from the Freemasons, which got it into trouble with the Roman Catholic church. Powderly, himself a Catholic, induced the Knights to drop their secrecy and most of their ritual, which he must have found difficult, for Americans love dressing up and mumbo-jumbo, as the success of certain fraternal and charitable organizations such as the Shriners have amply demonstrated in the twentieth century. His reward was a rapid growth in membership, based on two sorts of local assembly: the ‘trade assembly’, which was in all essentials a union, and the ‘mixed assembly’, which almost anyone could join, even small employers. Dues were high and gave the central body, run by Powderly, considerable leverage, since it would be up to the executive to decide which undertakings to back with its treasury. In principle this formula might have worked well: the Order could switch tactics according to opportunity, and by inducing farmers and city-dwellers, skilled and unskilled workers, socialists and small businessmen to co-operate might eventually mount a serious challenge to the ruling alliance of big business, the old political parties and Southern oligarchs. Unfortunately the difficulties were immense, for the hostilities between the various components of the Order were deep and bitter; and Powderly was not the man to overcome them. He was a poor administrator and insufficiently flexible. He was deeply opposed to strikes as weapons, preferring the boycott, although in many cases, particularly in the industrial East, it could not be applied effectively. For a few years the Knights were successful, and their membership swelled to a peak of more than 700,000 in the summer of 1886. But 1886 was the year of trial for Powderly and the Knights, and they failed the test. The chief cry of the working men was now for the eight-hour day; strikes and public meetings were held all over the country to secure this concession, and some dramatic clashes with authority occurred, the most famous being the Haymarket meeting in Chicago on 4 May, when some unidentified idiot or agent provocateur threw a bomb which killed a policeman and wounded others. (Only the day before, during a fight between strikers and strike-breakers at the McCormick Reaper factory, the police had killed two workers.) The police rioted, inflicting bloody injuries on everyone they could catch. The leaders of the workers’ movement in Chicago were arrested. It was never convincingly shown that these men had anything to do with the bomb (several of them were certainly innocent) but they were socialists and (with one exception) foreign-born. That was enough for the police, the courts and many business leaders. In due course, though scarcely according to due process, four of the prisoners were hanged. The strike action in support of the eight-hour day planned for the month of May failed; similar strikes on the railroads and in the meat-packing industry also failed. Powderly could do nothing in all this but wring his hands: he dissociated himself from the martyrs of the Hay-market, not wishing the Knights of Labor to get a name for anarchism, and he tried to stop the meat-packers’ strike. All this disgusted the workers. A revival of trade-unionism proper was taking place, for during the eighties a mild economic recovery, which had helped to swell the membership of the Knights (by bringing their dues within more people’s reach), had also stimulated efforts to create an American organization on the lines of the British Trades Union Congress. Some attempts were made to work out a demarcation agreement with the Knights of Labor, but the chance was muffed, partly because of Powderly’s inefficiency, partly because of bitter feelings
lower down the hierarchy on both sides. The failure of the Knights to provide effective leadership in the crisis finished the possibility of collaboration. In December 1886 a ‘Trades Congress’ was held at Columbus, Ohio, where the American Federation of Labor was launched. Before very long the Knights of Labor went into a sharp decline; Powderly was dethroned in 1893; then the socialists were expelled; by 1900 the Order was little more than a memory.
The AFL, on the other hand, became a permanent feature of the American scene. It owed this somewhat limited achievement above all to able and realistic leadership, which was supplied for nearly forty years by Samuel Gompers (1850–1924), its first president. Gompers, of Dutch-Jewish parentage, grew up in England, emigrating to America at the age of thirteen. His strength was that he understood perfectly the grievances, aspirations and limitations of the craft-workers, of whom he was one. He modelled the AFL accordingly. He worked in a cigar-factory in New York. It was a room in a tenement, airless, filthy, smelly, with a constant risk of tuberculosis (called the cigar-maker’s disease); the sort of sweatshop that was then known as a buckeye. But it was a place where workers could talk, shape each other’s views and discover leaders. Before long Gompers was the head of the cigar-makers’ union, and in 1886 he became the first president of the AFL. Most of his members, like himself, had come to America on a quest for personal betterment, and a union, or a league of unions, was only an instrument to further that quest: it carried no implications of class-consciousness, or solidarity, or socialism, or indeed any particular programme. The important point was by one means or another to safeguard and if possible to better your standard of living; to get a larger slice of the great American cake. Strikes were allowable, if directed pragmatically to the achievement of a precise goal: for Gompers, indeed, one of the merits of the AFL was that it would increase the funds available to strikers by giving them a national war-chest to draw on and make strike-breaking more difficult; but it was an equally good idea to get what you wanted by collaboration with the bosses. Gompers, rather like Booker T. Washington, hoped to get concessions from the employers in return for organizing and disciplining the American workforce. In return for (say) the eight-hour day, the AFL would guarantee that there would be no trouble on the factory floor, no strikes or commotions, until the next contract had to be negotiated. (Unfortunately all too few employers saw the advantage of this: the majority continued to harry unionism for all it was worth and then wondered why their workforce was hard to control.) As to ideology, all Gompers had to offer was what came to be known as ‘voluntarism’. This meant that unions ought to operate as mere friendly societies, looking voluntarily after their own members in sickness and old age: compulsory insurance, imposed and organized by the state, was a socialistic, un-American idea. Nor did Gompers believe in a highly centralized, high dues system such as the Knights of Labor had been. Local unions must be allowed the greatest possible autonomy. The AFL’s dues were only 3 cents a year.
