The B&O suggested that Governor Mathews ask President Rutherford Hayes for help. The president complied: on the morning of Wednesday the 18th, 400 soldiers—many just returned from South Carolina—left Washington and Baltimore for Martinsburg, riding a special train provided by the B&O. There the troops pushed the crowds back with bayonets and manned two trains, one going in each direction. The next day thirteen trains moved, all manned with troops.
The strike spread along the lines. On Friday, July 20, in Baltimore, state militia companies were stranded at Camden Station, surrounded by an angry crowd. In Pittsburgh, where the local militia again refused to fire on the crowds supporting the strikers, Governor John P. Hartranft ordered a Philadelphia militia company to the scene. Arriving on Saturday, they fired on the crowd, retreated into the Pennsylvania Railroad’s roundhouse, then withdrew under fire after a blazing rail car was rolled into the building. At least 40 civilians were killed; 500 rail cars, 104 locomotives, and 39 buildings went up in flames. At Johnstown, the troops were stoned. At Reading on Tuesday the 24th, the militia company from Morristown threatened to fire on the company from Easton, then stacked their arms and refused to deploy against the citizens. Three thousand federal soldiers were sent to Pennsylvania, and Governor Hartranft led troop convoys around the state for two weeks, opening fire on every crowd until it dispersed.
Within a week of Camden Junction, strikes had occurred on more than a dozen lines north to New York state, west to the Rockies, and south to Texas. Mass rallies were staged in Buffalo, Albany, Trenton, Boston, and New York City. After a 10,000-strong rally of workers at the Halsted Viaduct in Chicago beat off a police attack on Thursday the 26th, Secretary of War George W. McCrary ordered General Philip Sheridan to suspend his campaign against the Sioux and take his troops to Chicago.
In St. Louis, a general strike developed, and lasted five days. The railroads had quickly restored wage cuts, but the Relay Depot in East St. Louis was controlled by a committee representing workers from four lines. The Relay committee appealed to their brothers across the river, who went out in sympathy. An “Executive Committee” formed and over the next couple of days delegations visited every factory and shop to call out the workers. The Executive Committee called on Missouri Governor John S. Phelps to convene the legislature to pass laws enforcing an eight-hour day and prohibiting the employment of children under fourteen in factories or dangerous occupations. It called on Mayor Henry Overstolz to arrange for the distribution of food to destitute families (promising that the unions would pay for the food), and offered to help maintain public order.
But the tide had turned. Martinsburg had been pacified by Thursday the 19th, the Baltimore riots were over by the following Monday, and Pittsburgh was subdued the next day (though the B&O lines were not cleared until August 1, after three days of fighting). The Chicago and St. Louis strikes ended with the arrests of their leaders by Saturday, July 28. Overall, more than 100,000 railroad workers—about half the total, and affecting about two-thirds of the nation’s lines—had gone on strike, and cities from Baltimore, Buffalo, and Albany to St. Louis and Chicago had been occupied by troops.
Aside from the wartime contraband movement, the railroad strike was the largest strike to date in U.S. history. It had many notable features. The railroad workers were widely supported by other workers and their families. Women participated as fiercely as men; the Baltimore Sun reported that
The singular part of the disturbances is in the very active part taken by the women, who are the wives or mothers of the firemen. They look famished and wild and declare for starvation rather than have their people work for the reduced wages. Better to starve outright, say they, than to die by slow starvation.
Women and children were among the strike supporters killed in Pittsburgh.
Both blacks and whites participated. Many people in the Martinsburg crowd were black. Black and white coal miners together halted trains in the surrounding countryside. Black workers in St. Louis closed the canneries and docks, black boatmen stopped steamboats on the Mississippi, and the Executive Committee’s five-person delegation to the mayor included one black man. In Galveston, Texas, the strike began with black track layers and construction workers, and won a 30 percent increase. But racial animosity prevailed in San Francisco: on July 24, a mass meeting to discuss news of the disturbances spawned a mob of young men who rampaged through the city’s Chinatown, wrecking laundries and other small businesses. Anti-Chinese riots continued two more nights, and one Chinese laundryman was killed.
The strike was finally suppressed by the deployment of federal troops, required when some state militia units proved unreliable. In addition to the regular troops, city and state governments mobilized other armed forces—regular police, special deputies recruited and armed for the emergency, and civilian patrols, often organized and armed by the railroad companies.
The speed and scale of government intervention on the side of the railroad barons showed clearly that labor unrest—whatever the hardships of the workers and the merits of their complaints—would be treated as pathological social disorder. Business leaders, and the politicians and journalists they employed, saw everywhere the specter of “communism”—the insurrectionary spirit of the Paris Commune of 1871, spread by immigrant revolutionaries inciting tramps and hooligans to destroy civilized society. “RIOT OR REVOLUTION?” screamed the New York World headline on July 23, 1877. The federal government certainly feared revolution. President Hayes met daily with his cabinet from Friday the 20th through Sunday the 29th to review the crisis and military deployments. Sailors and marines were ordered to Washington to protect the Treasury.
From the vantage of 1877, the high hopes with which labor activists had celebrated the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865 seemed quite ironic and almost naive. They had looked forward to “a more equal share of the wealth”; now they endured repeated wage cuts. They had expected to enjoy “the privileges and blessings” of citizenship; now they were targeted by police riots, kangaroo courts, militia, and federal troops. Labor had defended the republic on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, only to see it seized by capital.
The second American revolution—like the first—was deeply inspiring and woefully incomplete. The Constitution was amended to abolish bondage and guarantee equality before the law—revolutionary advances that were thwarted and stalled but never wholly obliterated by the reactionary triumphs of the planters of the South and the industrialists of the North. Many workers still believed in the vision of America articulated in a poem by a member of the National Molders’ Union on the centennial of the Declaration of Independence:
For though slaves in their eyes we now may seem to be
Created by God for their pleasure alone;
The day’s not far distant, when we shall be free,
And tyrants their unpitied downfall bemoan.
Then gird on the sword in our glorious cause,
Every lover of liberty—all who’d be free,
And rescue thy children from tyranny’s jaws,
Break the chains that now wait for the child at thy knee.
* This was not her last slight by officialdom: her claim to a war pension was denied until 1899. She died in 1913 at her home in Auburn, New York; the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic gave her a military funeral.
* The Klan specialized in labor discipline: its founder, Nathan Bedford Forrest, had been the largest slave trader in Memphis, Tennessee, before the war, served as a Confederate general (commanding the troops who committed the Fort Pillow massacre), and became a railroad executive who often used convict labor on his Selma and Memphis line.
* After the Homestead Act of 1862, speculators staked bogus claims and bought the land at bargain prices. This was only a small part of the land grab. Between 1862 and 1864, Congress gave 70 million acres to three railroads—the Union Pacific, the Central Pacific, and the Northern Pacific—and turned over 140 million acres to states, which made their own bargains with
speculators.
* Lewis became the NTU’s corresponding secretary, charged with investigating industry working conditions. Her report to the 1871 convention criticized male typesetters: the women generally found “that they are more justly treated by what is termed ‘rat’ foremen, printers and employers than they are by union men.” She married fellow typesetter Alexander Troop in 1874, and moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where she raised seven children, wrote articles for her husband’s labor paper, agitated for suffrage, and worked on behalf of the city’s Italian immigrants.
CHAPTER
5
LABOR VERSUS MONOPOLY IN THE GILDED AGE
The economic crash of 1873 helped to douse the democratic revolution sparked by the Civil War. It also ushered in the Gilded Age, a quarter century of glittering riches for American capitalists and leaden poverty for masses of working people. Even more than in the past, politics and law protected class privilege and the accumulation of wealth.
The fortunes and influence of wealthy Americans exceeded anything the nation had ever seen. At the top of the heap stood a new group of monopoly capitalists like Jay Gould, whose empire included a slew of railroads and controlling interests in the Western Union Telegraph Company and several steamship lines. Gould was notorious for more than mere wealth. His corrupt stock transactions ruined so many people that he retained a phalanx of plainclothes police to protect him from assault and bombproofed his office in the Western Union headquarters near Wall Street. He bought a daily newspaper (the New York World) so the public could read good things about him. He stocked the greenhouse of his country estate with $40,000 worth of orchids, surrounded himself with European artwork, relaxed on a 230-foot yacht, and bestowed lavish gifts on state and federal lawmakers and judges. When he died in 1892, he left $77,000,000 to his heirs. As for labor, he boasted, “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”
For the vast majority of workers and their families, the Gilded Age brought unceasing economic insecurity in a churning national economy. The depression of 1873–78 was followed by a sharp recession in 1883–85, and another, deeper depression that stretched from spring 1893 through most of 1897. Even in the relatively good years between depressions and recessions, working people suffered repeated wage cuts and layoffs. At the same time, government officials serviced the interests of their business friends. In 1886, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that corporations were entitled to the same protections guaranteed to citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. State courts nullified laws that limited hours of labor, set minimum wages, or otherwise restricted employers’ “rights.” Judges routinely issued injunctions against strikes, demonstrations, boycotts, and organizing drives.
“There are too many millionaires and too many paupers,” observed the Hartford Courant in 1883. In 1890, the richest 1 percent of Americans had a combined annual income larger than the poorest 50 percent. Captains of finance and industry feasted at lavish banquets. The guests at one dinner puffed cigarettes wrapped in $100 bills; at another, rare black pearls were tucked into the oysters served as appetizers. Workers meanwhile scavenged for firewood. Bernardo Vega, a Puerto Rican immigrant to New York City, recalled his Aunt Dolores during the winter of 1879–80: “The price of coal had gone up, and what made it worse was that it was hard to come by. . . . Every day she would go out with the children in search of firewood to heat the house.” Each summer, millionaires caught the night ferry from Fall River, Massachusetts, to their summer homes in Newport, Rhode Island. As the ferry pulled out, passengers could view mill workers on the beaches digging for clams to supplement their meager diets. Children of the rich grew up with ponies, private tutors, and grand tours of Europe. In immigrant ghettoes like New York City’s Lower East Side, children lived in tenement flats with little daylight, less ventilation, and no running water. The census of 1880 counted more than a million wage workers under sixteen years of age. While millionaires built mansions modeled on European castles, many families had no shelter at all. In city after city, homeless people lined up every night to sleep in police stations.
The poet Walt Whitman saw in the increase in capitalist wealth “a sort of anti-democratic disease and monstrosity.” But to big businessmen and their spokesmen, their ascendancy was inevitable, natural, and sanctioned by God—the beneficient result of social evolution based on “the survival of the fittest.” The steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie wrote in 1889 that, “Individualism, Private Property, the Law of Accumulation of Wealth, and the Law of Competition” were “the highest result of human experience.” John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the oil and mining potentate, declared in a lecture to Sunday-school students: “The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest. . . . This is not an evil tendency in business . . . merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.” William Graham Sumner, Yale professor of political and social science and a favorite lapdog of the rich, opined that, “The millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement.”
Capitalists did not have to rely on natural law alone; they could buy favors from legislators and judges. State lawmakers passed a raft of anti-labor statutes that made picketing and strikes illegal and authorized corporations to use their own police in company towns. Anything an employer did to discourage unions (short of actual mayhem and murder) was a perfectly legal defense of his property rights. As in the past, labor activists were repeatedly indicted for conspiracy. Prosecutors did not have to prove criminal intent or action: under the law, the mere existence of a combination of workers violated an employer’s freedom to run a business in a profitable manner. In Moores v. Bricklayers’ Union (1890), Ohio’s supreme court ruled it illegal to make an employer conduct business according to union regulations.
Conspiracy trials were inefficient, however;they took time, required witnesses, and left it to juries to render a verdict. In 1877, a new, more streamlined legal device appeared—the labor injunction, applied first to striking railroad workers. Injunctions had several advantages over conspiracy indictments. They were issued by “equity” courts, where judges alone determined all issues of fact and law and decided what actions constituted contempt of court. Labor injunctions prohibited any activity that might cause irreparable harm to employers’ property: both tangible possessions like machinery and buildings and intangibles like the right to hire and sell.
Against this backdrop, working people mobilized on a scale that caught the upper classes by surprise. Though the labor movement had been devastated by the depression of the 1870s, the insurgent spirit so evident in the great railroad strike had not died out. In September 1880, a labor newspaper in Detroit predicted that the quiet of the past three years would prove to be the calm before a storm: “Labor is waking from its long slumber. The rising giant is just now stretching and . . . will make [its] strength felt in every phase of American life.” These were prophetic words. The 1880s and 1890s saw unprecedented levels of labor organizing, strike militancy, and political action by working people—initiatives aimed first and foremost at curbing the power of capitalist monopoly.
INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM: CONSOLIDATION AND CRISIS
The Union’s victory in the Civil War cleared the way for the swift expansion of American industry, and railroads drove the trend. The first transcontinental line was completed in 1869; by the late 1890s, more than 100,000 miles of new track had produced the largest rail system in the world. This massive construction rippled through feeder industries such as lumber, iron, and steel. Increased iron and steel production swelled demand for coal. The railroad network in turn linked producers everywhere to new markets, prompting a tremendous boom in industrial and agricultural output. Metal mining (gold, silver, copper, iron) proliferated in the West. Farming and ranching took more and more land. The South planted about 9 million acres of cotton in the early 1870s, about 24 million by the late 1890s. Annual wheat production in the North Central states rose from 67 mill
ion bushels in 1869 to 307 million in 1899. Meanwhile, in the Rocky Mountain states, wool production zoomed from 1 million to 123 million pounds a year.
Much of the land newly devoted to farming and grazing came from the railroads. They sold vast amounts to small homesteaders and to agribusinesses like the Miller and Lux partnership that owned more than 1 million acres in California’s San Joaquin Valley. About 150 million acres of the railroads’ land came from the government, which took it from Native Americans, by fiat or by deadly force.
Federal campaigns against Indians had resumed during the Civil War. In 1863–64 in Arizona, U.S. troops destroyed Navajos’ sheep, corn fields, and orchards, then rounded up 8,500 starving people for a “Long March” to a prison camp in New Mexico, where they were held four years before returning to Arizona under a new treaty. At Sand Creek, Colorado, soldiers overran a camp of Cheyennes and Arapahos in November 1864, killing 450 people. Immediately after the Civil War, Dakotas contested the construction of a road through their lands in the northern Great Plains (Montana and Wyoming); the five-year confrontation ended with their confinement to a reservation in Dakota Territory.
Indian wars continued throughout the Gilded Age. In 1870, Modocs left their reservation in Oregon to return home to northern California, where they fought the Army in 1872–73, before surrender and exile to Oklahoma. In 1871, Chiricahua resistance to reservation confinement started the Apache War in New Mexico and Arizona. It ended in 1886, when Geronimo’s band was captured, imprisoned in Florida until 1894, transferred to Oklahoma, and finally dispersed to several small southwestern reservations in 1913. An 1875 gold strike in the Black Hills on Dakota land brought out troops to protect prospectors. War parties led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse annihilated General George Armstrong Custer and 264 soldiers at Little Big Horn, but the Dakotas were defeated in October 1876. When the Nez Perce community in Oregon’s Wallowa Valley was ordered to Idaho in 1877, Chief Joseph led resisters on a three-month retreat towards Canada, but the Army pursued and caught them. They, too, were interned in Oklahoma (which they called eeikishpah, the “hot place”); the survivors were transferred to Washington’s Coleville Reservation in 1885.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 15
