by H. W. Brands
The Populists and their allies had declared class war against the rich. They hobbled the successful in the belief, as one of their spokesmen put it, “that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.” White couldn’t contain himself:
Oh, yes, Kansas is a great state. Here are people fleeing from it by the score every day, capital going out of the state by the hundreds of dollars; and every industry but farming paralyzed, and that crippled, because its products have to go across the ocean before they can find a laboring man at work who can afford to buy them. Let’s don’t stop this year. Let’s drive all the decent, self-respecting men out of the state. Let’s keep the old clodhoppers who know it all.…
What’s the matter with Kansas? Nothing under the shining sun. She is losing wealth, population and standing. She has got her statesmen, and the money power is afraid of her. Kansas is all right. She has started in to raise hell, as Mrs. Lease advised, and she seems to have an over-production. But that doesn’t matter. Kansas never did believe in diversified crops.31
Chapter 18
THE WAGES OF CAPITALISM
By the 1890s Chicago had fully recovered from the fire of 1871, and the city fathers were eager to debut their darling child to the world. The 1889 Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair in Paris that featured a thousand-foot iron tower designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, inspired American politicians and business leaders to ponder how they might outdo the French and assert commercial and technical preeminence for the United States. The approaching quadricentennial of Columbus’s landing in the New World provided the occasion, and the principal cities of the country vied for the honor. New York, Washington, and St. Louis made serious proposals, but when Congress—which would underwrite the fair—finally voted, Chicago won out.
The architectural firm of Burnham and Root took charge of the planning, but before it got far John Root suddenly died. Daniel Burnham paid his partner the appropriate respects in public, yet privately he fumed. “I have worked,” he said. “I have schemed and dreamed to make us the greatest architects in the world. I have made him see it and kept him at it. And now he dies. Damn! Damn! Damn!” Burnham pressed on, enlisting Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park and most recently of the California university Leland Stanford dedicated to the memory of his deceased son, to carve a fairgrounds from swampland along Lake Michigan south of the Loop. Louis Sullivan, Burnham’s Chicago rival, lately feted for the new Chicago Auditorium, would design the centerpiece structure: the transportation building. Frank Lloyd Wright, Sullivan’s young assistant, would help. George Ferris volunteered to make the world forget Eiffel and his tower by engineering something more impressive: a giant structure of iron that would rotate, lofting visitors high and sending them soaring above the fairgrounds and the city. George Westinghouse, the inventor of the railroad air brake, which was saving hundreds of lives each year, and recently the developer of electrical dynamos, or generators, won the contract to power the fair. Thomas Edison, Westinghouse’s foe in the “battle of the currents”—alternating current (Westinghouse) or direct current (Edison)—lost the power contract but won the consolation prize of lighting the fairgrounds with tens of thousands of his incandescent bulbs.
Burnham envisioned a “white city” of gleaming neoclassical structures set among lagoons and greenswards. Sullivan grumbled that Greece and Rome were no model for a progressive country; besides, he detested decoration and insisted on letting function dictate form. He ignored Burnham’s directions and built what turned out to be the sensation of the fair. But the other architects conformed to Burnham’s blueprint, albeit more slowly than he wished. As opening day approached, Burnham had to figure out how to get the buildings painted white in time. A New York painting contractor, Francis Millet, was brought in. Millet and his crews devised a novel method of applying the mixture of white lead and oil—through hoses and nozzles from tanks pressurized by air. The “whitewash gang,” Burnham called them, and their spray equipment, even while launching a revolution in the painting industry, finished the Chicago job with just hours to spare.
The World’s Columbian Exposition, as it was formally styled, opened on May 1, 1893. (Burnham could never have made a deadline of the actual four-hundredth anniversary, in October 1892; but anyway no one wanted to hold a fair during Chicago’s winter.) Half a million people crammed the grounds that first day. President Cleveland came from Washington; the Infanta Eulalia arrived from Spain. The organizers found two direct descendants of Columbus. Governor John Peter Altgeld greeted the guests on behalf of the state of Illinois.
The throng gawked at a telescope donated by Chicago railroad magnate Charles Yerkes to the University of Chicago. They ogled the latest weapons technology from Germany’s Krupp works. Edison displayed his phonograph and the Kinetoscope, a forerunner of the motion picture projector. The exhibit of the American Bell Telephone Company enabled fair-goers to communicate by long-distance telephone with friends in New York. Many visitors got their first direct appreciation of standard time zones (adopted by American railroads during the 1880s) by observing the fair clocks, which were connected electrically to the Naval Observatory in Washington, an hour ahead of Chicago. George Ferris’s giant wheel wasn’t finished when the fair began, but its size and shape drew gasps nonetheless.
The fair brought out reformers of every stripe and cause: prohibitionists, who found themselves swimming upstream against the river of liquor that flowed through Chicago for the fair; consumer safety advocates, who protested the shocking conditions in the slaughterhouses of the city; bicyclists, who agitated for better roads on which to ride their two-wheeled vehicles; labor unionists, who hoped to promote solidarity; silverites, who plumped the white metal; feminists, who demanded the vote for women. Exotic dancer Little Egypt made a feminist statement of a different sort, against conventional notions of a woman’s role; the size of the crowds at her performances suggested substantial agreement, at least among those many who stayed for the encores.
A touching scene unfolded after Susan B. Anthony crashed a meeting of managers discussing whether to keep the fair open on Sundays. Anthony, despite having no voice in the decision, volunteered that it should stay open. A sarcastic male inquired whether she’d prefer having a son of hers—if she had had any—attend the Wild West show Buffalo Bill Cody was putting on at the fair or go to church. She opted for Cody’s show. “He would learn far more,” she said. When Cody heard of her sacrilege, he sent her tickets. She sat in the best box in the house, and at the beginning of the show he galloped up and saluted her. She stood—“as enthusiastic as a girl,” a friend remarked—and waved her handkerchief in reply.1
LIKE MOST SUCH expositions, the Chicago fair cost a great deal of money to stage, and the fair organizers and sponsors were counting on heavy attendance to recoup their investment. The enormous opening day crowd boded well for the bottom line. But before the week was out, the fair was blindsided by an event that seemed to have no connection whatsoever to the exposition—unless one assumed that all things capitalistic were connected, one to the other. Since the passage of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1890 the world financial markets had looked askance at the United States, wondering whether the Treasury would or could fulfill its promise to redeem the dollar for gold. The emergence of the Populist party increased the worries; should the agrarian radicals have their silver way, the dollar would plunge in value, leaving dollar holders drastically short. During the early months of 1893 the Treasury received an unusual quantity of dollars for redemption, till the government’s gold reserve approached the $100 million minimum generally thought necessary to maintain investor confidence. On April 22, just nine days before the fair opened, the gold reserve briefly touched the threshold, causing throats to catch on both sides of the Atlantic.2
The stock market shared the nervousness, as it always did. Railroads were especially vulnerable. Jay Gould had died of
consumption, or tuberculosis, the previous December, and though editors and other keepers of the public conscience bade the arch-speculator good riddance—Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World called Gould “one of the most sinister figures that ever flitted bat-like across the vision of the American people”—many investors had come to perceive him as a stabilizing force in the railroad industry. Two months later the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad closed its doors. The Reading wasn’t the nation’s largest railroad, but it was one of the oldest, and its failure made brokers and investors wonder who or what was next.3
They got their answer the week the Chicago fair opened. It wasn’t a railroad that went down but the National Cordage Company—the “rope trust.” National Cordage was arguably less central to the country’s economy than the Reading Railroad, although it did command four-fifths of the market for rope and related binders. But the already skittish markets took the failure as cause for panic. Banks folded by the scores. In June the British government of India, one of the last large consumers of silver, declared that it would no longer purchase the metal, sending silver stocks, which had risen after the Sherman silver law and upon the emergence of Populism, into a death spiral. In July the New York, Lake Erie & Western Railroad (the successor to Jay Gould’s Erie) failed. This drove the financial system off a cliff, despite the swift repeal of the Sherman law. Now banks by the hundreds—more than six hundred in all—closed their doors, leaving depositors pounding helplessly outside. Persons solvent just weeks before found themselves bereft and disoriented. Henry Adams awoke one day to discover that his inherited savings had all but vanished. “As a starting point for a new education at fifty-five years old,” he later wrote with an equanimity he didn’t feel in the moment, “the shock of finding oneself suspended, for several months, over the edge of bankruptcy, without knowing how one got there, or how to get away, is to be strongly recommended.” Though a student of other people’s money, Adams had never much worried about his own. Suddenly he had to, but to little avail. “The more he saw of it,” he wrote of the panic, “the less he understood it. He was quite sure that nobody understood it much better. Blindly some very powerful energy was at work, doing something that nobody wanted done.” Yet the effects of this imponderable, implacable force were inescapable. “Men died like flies under the strain, and Boston grew suddenly old, haggard, and thin.”4
By this point in America’s economic development, bank drafts and checks played a larger role in the day-to-day money supply than currency, and the collapse of the banking system caused a strangling shrinkage of the money supply. Interest rates soared, capital investment clanked to a halt, inventories clogged warehouses, new orders vanished, businesses failed by the thousands, and workers lost jobs by the millions. Twenty years further into the industrial age than at the last such panic, twenty years further from the comparative safety net of the farm, the American economy suffered that much more. Evictions followed layoffs, and hunger followed both. The tide of immigration slowed, and even reversed for some countries, but unemployment continued to rise.
THE DEPRESSION INTENSIFIED the strain between labor and management. After the Haymarket riot of 1886, organized labor had retrenched. Smaller, focused unions of skilled workers emerged from the remnants of larger groups; among the most successful skilled unions was the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, with some twenty-five thousand members, concentrated in the mills around Pittsburgh. The state of the art in steel production was Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead works, seven miles east of Pittsburgh on the bank of the Monongahela River, where Carnegie had installed open-hearth furnaces and other equipment that dramatically improved efficiency. Yet these very improvements threatened the wages and even the jobs of members of the Amalgamated union, as the innovations allowed Carnegie to employ unskilled, nonunion workers in place of the Amalgamated men. Carnegie and the union first collided in 1889, when he proposed a 25 percent wage reduction. The Amalgamated leadership rejected the proposal but was forced to accept a three-year deal pegging wages to steel prices. If prices rose, the workers would share the gain; if prices fell, they’d suffer the loss, albeit only till prices hit a floor of $25 per ton of steel billets. The company would swallow any loss beyond that.5
As the contract approached its end in the summer of 1892, the price of billets had fallen substantially, and the company proposed to lower both the sliding scale and the minimum. Carnegie fancied himself an enlightened employer. “For twenty-six years I had been actively in charge of the relations between ourselves and our men,” he wrote, “and it was the pride of my life to think how delightfully satisfactory these had been.” Doubtless sensing that his record might soon be spoiled, he delegated authority to Henry Clay Frick and departed for a holiday in Scotland. Frick had no such unsullied record as Carnegie and few compunctions about utilizing whatever leverage he had over the workers and their union. Frick made clear that the company’s offer was nonnegotiable; the workers could accept it or seek work elsewhere. His demeanor and overall approach indicated he’d be just as happy if the union rejected his proposal, as he could then replace the union workers with non-union men. This interpretation gained credence when company workmen constructed a twelve-foot-high fence about the Homestead works, with steel gates, barbed wire, and rifle slits. What the workers didn’t know was that Frick had meanwhile contracted with Robert Pinkerton, the son and successor of Allan Pinkerton, to provide a private security force to the Homestead plant.6
The June 30 deadline arrived without agreement. Frick informed the workers that the plant would close till July 6; any who wished to return could apply for jobs then, but as individuals rather than union members. The Amalgamated union had laid in supplies and saved what cash its members could spare; it organized a strike committee to assist members in need and maintain solidarity. Union members, in round-the-clock shifts, kept watch over the plant lest Frick try to slip scabs onto the premises.
On July 5 union sympathizers at Bellevue, Pennsylvania, not far from Homestead, reported the arrival by train of the Pinkerton men, who boarded two barges for the final approach to Homestead. Before the barges came within sight of the plant, the workers had spread the alarm. An informal militia of workers raced to the waterfront below the plant, and as the barges, propelled by a tug, drew near, the workers opened fire.
How much the Pinkertons knew of the details of the dispute between the company and the union is hard to tell; their surprise at the violence their arrival provoked suggests that Robert Pinkerton hadn’t informed them of the depth of the workers’ determination. When Pinkerton’s lieutenants began handing out rifles, some of the agents declined, preferring not to fight it out with the workers. Yet others accepted the weapons and returned the workers’ fire.
After the captain of the tugboat grounded the barges on the bank of the Monongahela, several of the Pinkertons tried to get off. The leader of the squad, Frederick Heinde, boldly declared that he and his men had been hired by the steel company to secure the steelworks, and they intended to do precisely that. The workers, he warned, had better step aside. The workers refused, and when Heinde attempted to force his way past, one of the workers shot him in the thigh. Several more shots followed, one hitting Heinde in the shoulder, another hitting a Pinkerton standing beside Heinde and killing him instantly. Four more Pinkertons were wounded. Their fellows returned the fire, killing two workers and wounding about twenty others before the agents returned to the barges and the workers retreated up the bank.
An ugly standoff ensued. The Pinkertons suffered from the summer heat and the close quarters of the barges, and the thought of what the angry workers might do to them. Some of the workers tossed sticks of dynamite at the barges; these effected little damage to the steel craft but seriously dented the Pinkertons’ morale. Another group of workers pumped hundreds of gallons of oil into the river upstream from the barges and attempted to set it alight as it drifted down. But the fuel wouldn’t catch. Still another group improved on the incendiary i
dea, commandeering a raft, filling it with oily refuse, setting it ablaze, and pushing it downstream toward the barges. This variant came close to succeeding, but the current redirected the fiery vessel at the last moment and spared the Pinkertons from roasting.
Gradually the leaders of the workers recognized that further bloodshed, even if justified as retaliation for those killed, would jeopardize popular sympathy for the workers’ cause. As the afternoon waned, this view caught hold among the rank and file. When the Pinkertons expressed a desire to have done with private policing, the union leaders offered to let them leave the barges and get out of town. The Pinkertons accepted. But they had hardly set foot on the bank when the union leaders lost control of the workers, who fell upon the Pinkertons quite brutally. Most of the agents were cuffed and kicked; some were beaten unconscious. Two died. Those who remained on their feet took refuge in the town theater, where the union leaders posted guards to protect them from further abuse. Finally a special train sent by Henry Frick from Pittsburgh fetched them and carried them off.7
THE UNION LEADERS were right to be concerned about a loss of popular sympathy. Diehard unionists praised the Homestead workers for standing up to arrogant capital, but neutral observers—and of course apologists for management—tended to think the workers had gone too far. This feeling intensified two weeks later when a man posing as an employment agent from New York entered Frick’s office and fired at the steel executive twice from close range. The first bullet clipped Frick’s ear before penetrating his neck; the second just missed his spinal column below the skull. Frick’s assistant knocked the gunman’s hand awry as he fired a third shot, which missed. The intruder thereupon pulled a knife and stabbed Frick three times—in the hip, in the leg, and just over the kidney. Finally Frick, bleeding profusely, and the assistant wrestled the intruder down.8
