Module 5: The Labor Movement

In Module 4, we discussed the revolutionary economic changes the US went through between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century. Significant changes in technology drastically impacted the lives of ordinary citizens, and contributed to the extreme wealth of a few elite members of American society.

In 1890, the wealthiest 1% of Americans owned one-fourth of the nation’s assets. The top 10% owned over seventy percent of those assets. By 1900, the richest 10% controlled approximately 90% of the nation’s wealth.

In this module, we’ll turn to the other end of the spectrum and examine the experiences of the laborers who contributed so much to these economic changes by physically performing the work required to industrialize the United States.

"Attention Workingmen!" 1886 Poster, Chicago

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Three essential questions will guide this module blog post:

1. How did people make sense of the economic inequality of the Gilded Age?

2. What were some of the major gains and setbacks of labor organizers in the Gilded Age?

3. How did farmers in the South and West mobilize for better economic conditions?

Let's get started!

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Part I: Inequality and Free Labor in the Gilded Age

In Part I, we’ll explore how wealthy Americans processed their success and rationalized the extreme gap between rich and poor. In Module 4, we covered the myth of the “self-made man,” that it was only hard work and virtue that were needed to land at the top. Did this idea apply to working-class people in the Gilded Age?

Social Darwinism:

In the 1870s, the idea of the “self-made man” took on a scientific connotation. British sociologist and biologist Herbert Spencer applied Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to society. Spencer popularized the phrase “survival of the fittest.”

Herbert Spencer

According to Spencer, the “fittest” members of society would demonstrate their superiority through economic success, while the weak would only survive through state welfare and private charity.

Thus, inequality became part of the "natural order." To Spencer and other Social Darwinists, it wasn’t the result of institutional problems or labor systems, but part of the competitive struggle for survival. The competition itself—which by definition had “winners” and “losers,” signified societal progress.

In 1907, journalist H.L. Mencken wrote in the Baltimore Sun: “All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to uplift the weak.”

William Graham Sumner

William Graham Sumner, a professor at Yale, and a prominent American Social Darwinist, believed that freedom itself required the acceptance of inequality. The nation itself could not be free if everyone was equal. There were two alternatives:: “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest.”

"Free Labor" in the Gilded Age

During the Gilded Age, the concept of “free labor” fundamentally changed. The concept had originated as a celebration of the independent small producer in a society of equality. It had been used to denounce slavery—proponents of free labor argued that unfree labor practices limited opportunities for everyone.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “free labor” meant limited government and an unrestrained free market. In this definition, neither the government nor unions had a right to interfere with working conditions. Supposedly, labor relations were governed by contracts freely arrived at by independent individuals. Thus, Americans could not complain about the loss of freedom as a result of labor practices.

State and federal courts regularly struck down laws regulating businesses because these laws interfered with worker's "rights" to choose their own employers and working conditions; and entrepreneurs' "rights" to utilize their property as they saw fit.

Laws which regulated businesses in any way—including the establishment of maximum hours people could work or regulating working conditions—were seen as an insult to free labor.

• In 1885, the New York Court of Appeals struck down a state law prohibiting the manufacture of cigars in tenement dwellings, on the grounds that the law deprived a worker of the “liberty” to work “where he will.”

• In 1905, the Supreme Court voided a state law establishing ten hours per day, or sixty hours per week, as the maximum hours of work for bakers. The court ruled that this law was an unconstitutional infringement of freedom of contract—the freedom of employees to "sell" their labor to employers.

John P. Mitchell

Workers spoke out against this definition of "freedom." For example, the mine union leader John P. Mitchell argued that workers “are being guaranteed the liberties they do not want and denied the liberty that is of real value to them.”

Poll #1:

Think back to the material covered in Module 4 about the vast economic growth of the Gilded Age. Consider that alongside the information above on Social Darwinism and free labor. Then, answer the following question: should the "Gilded Age" be considered a period of increased economic freedom? Or increased economic inequality? Answer in the poll below, or check it out here. Then, please elaborate on your answer in the comments and/or annotations!

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Part II: Union Organizing

In Part II, we’ll examine workers’ responses to industrialization. Workers agitated for shorter working hours and better working conditions. More and more after Reconstruction’s end in 1877, questions about labor began to replace national debates about slavery.

Blockade of Engines at Martinsburg, WV Harper's Weekly 1877

Great Railroad Strike of 1877

In July 1877, a widely publicized event captured the significance of the debate over labor. Workers at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad uncoupled trains in the station at Martinsburg, West Virginia in protest of a 10% wage cut. The governor of West Virginia dispatched militia units to try to force the railroad workers back to work. When militia forces were unable to get the workers to free the trains, federal troops were sent in.

Meanwhile, the strike spread to other stations on the B & O line all the way to Chicago. It then grew to include Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Railroad. When troops fired on strikers in Pittsburgh, killing 20 people, workers responded by burning the city’s railroad yards, destroying millions of dollars in property. General strikes spread to Chicago and St. Louis, revealing a sense of solidarity among workers.

President Rutherford B. Hayes sent federal troops to the Northeastern cities to put down the strikers. As you might remember from Module 2, Hayes obtained the presidency by compromising and agreeing to withdraw federal troops from the South. Those troops had been sent to safeguard black voters’ access to the polls and to assist with Reconstruction.

In the aftermath of the strikes of 1877, the federal government constructed armories in major cities to ensure that troops could be on hand in the event of other labor difficulties.

Knights of Labor

Seal of the Knights of Labor

The 1880s witnessed a new wave of labor organizing. The Knights of Labor were the first group to try and organize unskilled workers as well as skilled workers. Their membership was quite diverse including women as well as men, and blacks as well as whites. According to the American Yawp, the Knights only barred lawyers, bankers, and liquor dealers from the union.

The group reached a membership of over 700,000 by 1886. Their overarching vision was a cooperative, producer-centered society that rewarded labor, not capital. They focused on organizing workers into local unions, and were a large player in strikes, boycotts, and political action around the country.

Poll #2:

Labor reformers focused on such changes as institutionalizing an eight-hour work day, ensuring safer conditions, and fewer hours for workers. Most significantly, labor activists questioned the notion that freedom could exist in a society with extreme economic inequality. Do you agree? Answer in the poll below (or see the poll here). Then, share why you answered the way you did in the annotations or comments!

Coal Mining Industry

We’ll now turn to one specific industry, anthracite coal mining, to explore some of the working conditions faced by many laborers. We'll watch a short video, linked below, which connects the industry to economic changes and practices which we covered in Module 4.

Hazelton Coal Miners, 1905

While you are watching the video (instructions on how to play the video to follow), please consider the following:

Working Conditions

The video will describe the working conditions within the anthracite coal mining industry. It should resonate with the Memory Palace podcast assigned for this module, which explores the labor of the men who built the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1870s and 1880s.

Specific similarities in the two examples include the extreme nature of the labor itself—laborers were trapped in confined spaces, and faced the threat of death by suffocation or an explosion. This kind of work put immense pressure on workers’ bodies. Consider the toll that it must have taken over time. As Nate DiMeo notes in the podcast, this was an age before things like ibuprofen, heating pads, and Vicodin.

Family Relationships

The video also draws attention to the families of laborers, who watched their relatives go to work each day and faced the possibility that they would not come home.

Mining work was not the work of a single breadwinner. Wives of miners contributed to the financial health of the household by taking in boarders. Children also contributed to the family income by working in dangerous occupations from a young age.

The abolition of child labor was a demand of labor unions in the late 19th century, and laws regulating child labor had been passed by 28 states by 1899. However, it wasn’t until 1938 that the US government instituted national child labor laws.

Ethnic Tensions

Also consider the impact of ethnic tensions among workers on labor organizing. How did ethnic differences and conflicts prevent workers from joining together to demand improvements on their shared working conditions?

In Module 3, we covered one extreme episode of racial divisions among laborers—the massacre of Chinese mine workers at Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885. These were tensions that ran very, very deeply.

Now, watch the video from Annenberg Learner available in the embedded site below, or available here. Please note: you are not required to watch the entire video. Start the video at 12:30 minutes and stop it at 25:15 minutes.

After watching the video, answer the following polls:

Poll #3:

In your opinion, which of the following was the most pressing concern of laborers in the coal mining industry in the late 19th century? Safe working conditions, adequate wages, or employers' respect? Access the poll here if it doesn't load below.

Poll #4:

Do you think proponents of Social Darwinism (“survival of the fittest”) and those committed to free labor (the “right” of laborers to work where and how long they wanted) thought those philosophies were applicable to children? Yes or no?

Haymarket Affair

On May 1, 1886, 350,000 workers in cities around the country demonstrated for an eight-hour workday. May 1, or May Day, became an annual date of parades, picnics, and protests, celebrated around the world. Just two days after the May Day demonstrations, two laborers were killed by police during a union action at McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago.

During a protest the following day in Haymarket Square, a bomb was thrown. Police responded by firing into the crowd. Before the violence ended, seven policemen were killed, 60 people were wounded, and five civilians were dead. The bomb thrower was never caught.

The “Haymarket Affair” created widespread panic and hysteria, mainly directed at immigrants, labor leaders, and especially anarchists. Employers took the opportunity to paint the entire labor movement as dangerous and un-American, a force prone to violence and led by foreign-born radicals.

Eight prominent anarchists were convicted of murder, on the grounds that they had conspired with or aided the assailant who threw the bomb. Four were hanged, and one committed suicide in his prison cell. The other three remained in prison until their sentences were later commuted.

"The Haymarket Riot," May 15, 1866, Harper's Weekly

Seven of the eight men accused of plotting the Haymarket bombing were foreign-born—six Germans and one English immigrant. The last was a native of Alabama, who had married a Black woman after the Civil War and edited a Republican newspaper in Texas during Reconstruction.

After Haymarket, membership in the Knights of Labor plummeted, as the group became increasingly associated with violence and radicalism. The national movement for an eight-hour workday also collapsed.

Socialism

During the Gilded Age, more and more thinkers grappled with the problems of unequal distribution of wealth with a series of books and novels which proposed remedies for the country’s problems.

Socialism, the belief that private control of economic enterprises should be replaced by government ownership in order to ensure a fairer distribution of the benefits of wealth, was a major political force in Europe. In the US, socialist beliefs were largely confined to immigrants writing in foreign languages.

The first book to popularize socialist ideas for an American audience was Laurence Gronlund’s Cooperative Commonwealth. Gronlund portrayed socialism as the end result of a peaceful evolution rather than a violent upheaval, making it more appealing to Americans who wanted to see an end to class conflict.

Laurence Grondlund, 1895

In 1880, Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward, which promoted socialist ideas without calling them socialism. Instead, he wrote of “nationalism.”

In the book, the main character falls asleep in the 19th century, waking in the year 2000. He finds a world where cooperation has replaced class strife, cutthroat competition, and excessive individualism.

The book inspired the creation of hundreds of nationalist clubs, devoted to bringing the kind of world Bellamy envisioned into existence.

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Part III: Populism

Most of this blog post has been focused on workers and organizing in industrial jobs and cities. We'll end the module blog post by shifting to the South and trans-Mississippi West, where farmers organized in response to falling agricultural prices and growing economic dependency in rural areas.

First Banner of the Southern Farmer's Alliance, 1878

Farmers' Alliance

Farmers increasingly believed that the reason they were in debt and threatened with the loss of their land was because of government policies that drove down farm prices, high rates charged by railroad companies, and excessive interest rates for loans from merchants and bankers.

Farmers organized into the Farmers’ Alliance, the largest citizens’ movement of the 19th century. Founded in Texas in the late 1870s, the Alliance had spread to forty-three states by 1890.

The Alliance proposed that the federal government establish warehouses where farmers could store their crops until they were sold. Using the crops as collateral, the government would then issue low-interest loans to farmers, ending their dependence on bankers and merchants.

Organizers traveled from town to town across the South, Midwest, and Plains, holding revival-style “camp meetings,” distributing pamphlets, and establishing Alliance newspapers. Farmers spoke out against landowners’ practices of opening up their own stores to sell supplies to farmers, trapping sharecroppers in a cycle of debt. These practices were similar to company mining towns where employees would buy all of their goods at a “company store.”

At its peak, the Farmers’ Alliance claimed 1,500,000 members, meeting in 40,000 local sub-alliances. The Alliance envisioned the nation as a “cooperative commonwealth” that would protect the interests of the many from the greed of the few. They had a vision of America as a commonwealth of small producers whose freedom rested on the ownership of productive property and respect for the dignity of labor.

Divisions between black and white farmers led black farmers to form the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. Watch a (short) video about this group below:

Poll #5:

In your opinion, was the Farmers' Alliance a labor union? Answer the poll below or view the poll here.

Populist Party

The Alliance evolved into what was known as the People’s Party, or the Populists. Their political platform of 1892 spoke of a nation “brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin” by political corruption and economic inequality.

The Populists’ proposals included the direct election of US senators, a graduated income tax, a system of public financing to enable farmers to market their crops, and recognition of the rights of workers to form unions. They also called for public ownership of the railroads to guarantee farmers inexpensive access to the markets for their crops.

Crucially, some white Populists insisted that Black and white farmers shared common grievances and could unite for common goals. Tom Watson, a leading Populist in Georgia, told interracial audiences,” “You are kept apart so that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings.” This sounded very similar to the rhetoric of John P. Mitchell in the video about anthracite coal miners.

Campaign Poster for Thomas Watson

Ultimately though, the potential for unity between Blacks and whites of similar economic backgrounds was broken by racism. Democrats were in danger of losing political challenges to the Populists. They mobilized white voters with warnings about “black supremacy.” By blocking Black voters’ access to the polls, they undercut a potential interracial movement.

As historian Lawrence Goodwyn wrote in The Populist Moment, “White supremacy hung over the organization with a brooding presence that ultimately proved suffocating.” [1]

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Conclusion

1. Some explained economic inequality as evidence of the “survival of the fittest.” Others saw it as evidence of the damaging effects of cutthroat competition and class strife.

2. Although unions like the Knights of Labor saw an increase in membership and workers in industries like coal mining gained some wage increases, after the Haymarket Affair in 1886, labor unions were increasingly associated with radical and dangerous ideologies.

3. The Farmer’s Alliance mobilized 1.5 million members in its campaign for a “cooperative commonwealth.” The Alliance eventually grew into the Populist Party.

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Citations

[1] Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 122-123.