{"id":66,"date":"2023-03-10T23:52:22","date_gmt":"2023-03-10T23:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/chapter\/module-1-10\/"},"modified":"2023-04-27T19:29:09","modified_gmt":"2023-04-27T19:29:09","slug":"module-1-10","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/chapter\/module-1-10\/","title":{"raw":"1.10 Labor in the Gilded Age","rendered":"1.10 Labor in the Gilded Age"},"content":{"raw":"

The Rise of Inequality<\/span><\/h2>\r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Glazier Glazier Stove Company, moulding room, Chelsea, Michigan, ca 1900-1910. Library of Congress<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIndustrial capitalism realized the greatest advances in efficiency and productivity that the world had ever seen. Massive new companies marshaled capital on an unprecedented scale and provided enormous profits that created unheard-of fortunes. But it also created millions of low-paid, unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working conditions. Industrial capitalism confronted Gilded Age Americans with unprecedented inequalities. The sudden appearance of the extreme wealth of industrial and financial leaders alongside the crippling squalor of the urban and rural poor shocked Americans. \u201cThis association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times,\u201d economist Henry George wrote in his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty.1<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nThe great financial and industrial titans, the so-called robber barons, including railroad operators such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, oilmen such as J. D. Rockefeller, steel magnates such as Andrew Carnegie, and bankers such as J. P. Morgan, won fortunes that, adjusted for inflation, are still among the largest the nation has ever seen. According to various measurements, in 1890 the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned one fourth of the nation\u2019s assets; the top 10 percent owned over 70 percent. And inequality only accelerated. By 1900, the richest 10 percent controlled perhaps 90 percent of the nation\u2019s wealth.2<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nAs these vast and unprecedented new fortunes accumulated among a small number of wealthy Americans, new ideas arose to bestow moral legitimacy upon them. In 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution through natural selection in his On the Origin of Species. It was not until the 1870s, however, that those theories gained widespread traction among biologists, naturalists, and other scientists in the United States and, in turn, challenged the social, political, and religious beliefs of many Americans. One of Darwin\u2019s greatest popularizers, the British sociologist and biologist Herbert Spencer, applied Darwin\u2019s theories to society and popularized the phrase survival of the fittest. The fittest, Spencer said, would demonstrate their superiority through economic success, while state welfare and private charity would lead to social degeneration\u2014it would encourage the survival of the weak.3<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Photograph \u201cFive Cents a Spot,\u201d unauthorized immigration lodgings in a Bayard Street tenement, New York City, ca.1890. Library of Congress<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n\u201cThere must be complete surrender to the law of natural selection,\u201d the Baltimore Sun journalist H. L. Mencken wrote in 1907. \u201cAll 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.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a> By the time Mencken wrote those words, the ideas of social Darwinism had spread among wealthy Americans and their defenders. Social Darwinism identified a natural order that extended from the laws of the cosmos to the workings of industrial society. All species and all societies, including modern humans, the theory went, were governed by a relentless competitive struggle for survival. The inequality of outcomes was to be not merely tolerated but encouraged and celebrated. It signified the progress of species and societies. Spencer\u2019s major work, Synthetic Philosophy, sold nearly four hundred thousand copies in the United States by the time of his death in 1903. Gilded Age industrial elites, such as steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, inventor Thomas Edison, and Standard Oil\u2019s John D. Rockefeller, were among Spencer\u2019s prominent followers. Other American thinkers, such as Yale\u2019s William Graham Sumner, echoed his ideas. Sumner said, \u201cBefore the tribunal of nature a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nBut not all so eagerly welcomed inequalities. The spectacular growth of the U.S. economy and the ensuing inequalities in living conditions and incomes confounded many Americans. But as industrial capitalism overtook the nation, it achieved political protections. Although both major political parties facilitated the rise of big business and used state power to support the interests of capital against labor, big business looked primarily to the Republican Party.\r\n\r\nThe Republican Party had risen as an antislavery faction committed to \u201cfree labor,\u201d but it was also an ardent supporter of American business. Abraham Lincoln had been a corporate lawyer who defended railroads, and during the Civil War the Republican national government took advantage of the wartime absence of southern Democrats to push through a pro-business agenda. The Republican congress gave millions of acres and dollars to railroad companies. Republicans became the party of business, and they dominated American politics throughout the Gilded Age and the first several decades of the twentieth century. Of the sixteen presidential elections between the Civil War and the Great Depression, Republican candidates won all but four. Republicans controlled the Senate in twenty-seven out of thirty-two sessions in the same period. Republican dominance maintained a high protective tariff, an import tax designed to shield American businesses from foreign competition; southern planters had vehemently opposed this policy before the war but now could do nothing to prevent. It provided the protective foundation for a new American industrial order, while Spencer\u2019s social Darwinism provided moral justification for national policies that minimized government interference in the economy for anything other than the protection and support of business.\r\n

The Labor Movement<\/h3>\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Photograph The Lawrence Textile Strike, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, led by the Industrial Workers of the World. Library of Congress<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe ideas of social Darwinism attracted little support among the mass of American industrial laborers. American workers toiled in difficult jobs for long hours and little pay. Mechanization and mass production threw skilled laborers into unskilled positions. Industrial work ebbed and flowed with the economy. The typical industrial laborer could expect to be unemployed one month out of the year. They labored sixty hours a week and could still expect their annual income to fall below the poverty line. Among the working poor, wives and children were forced into the labor market to compensate. Crowded cities, meanwhile, failed to accommodate growing urban populations and skyrocketing rents trapped families in crowded slums.\r\n\r\nStrikes ruptured American industry throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Workers seeking higher wages, shorter hours, and safer working conditions had struck throughout the antebellum era, but organized unions were fleeting and transitory. The Civil War and Reconstruction seemed to briefly distract the nation from the plight of labor, but the end of the sectional crisis and the explosive growth of big business, unprecedented fortunes, and a vast industrial workforce in the last quarter of the nineteenth century sparked the rise of a vast American labor movement.\r\n\r\nThe failure of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 convinced workers of the need to organize. Union memberships began to climb. The Knights of Labor enjoyed considerable success in the early 1880s, due in part to its efforts to unite skilled and unskilled workers. It welcomed all laborers, including women (the Knights only barred lawyers, bankers, and liquor dealers). By 1886, the Knights had over seven hundred thousand members. The Knights envisioned a cooperative producer-centered society that rewarded labor, not capital, but, despite their sweeping vision, the Knights focused on practical gains that could be won through the organization of workers into local unions.6<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"\" An 1892 cover of Harper\u2019s Weekly depicting the Homestead Riot, showed Pinkerton men who had surrendered to the steel mill workers navigating a gauntlet of violent strikers. W.P. Synder (artist) after a photograph by Dabbs, \u201cThe Homestead Riot,\u201d 1892. Library of Congress<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn Marshall, Texas, in the spring of 1886, one of Jay Gould\u2019s rail companies fired a Knights of Labor member for attending a union meeting. His local union walked off the job, and soon others joined. From Texas and Arkansas into Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois, nearly two hundred thousand workers struck against Gould\u2019s rail lines. Gould hired strikebreakers and the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a kind of private security contractor, to suppress the strikes and get the rails moving again. Political leaders helped him, and state militias were called in support of Gould\u2019s companies. The Texas governor called out the Texas Rangers. Workers countered by destroying property, only winning them negative headlines and for many justifying the use of strikebreakers and militiamen. The strike broke, briefly undermining the Knights of Labor, but the organization regrouped and set its eyes on a national campaign for the eight-hour day.7<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nIn the summer of 1886, the campaign for an eight-hour day, long a rallying cry that united American laborers, culminated in a national strike on May 1, 1886. Somewhere between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand workers struck across the country.\r\n\r\nIn Chicago, police forces killed several workers while breaking up protesters at the McCormick reaper works. Labor leaders and radicals called for a protest at Haymarket Square the following day, which police also proceeded to break up. But as they did, a bomb exploded and killed seven policemen. Police fired into the crowd, killing four. The deaths of the Chicago policemen sparked outrage across the nation, and the sensationalization of the Haymarket Riot helped many Americans to associate unionism with radicalism. Eight Chicago anarchists were arrested and, despite no direct evidence implicating them in the bombing, were charged and found guilty of conspiracy. Four were hanged (and one committed suicide before he could be executed). Membership in the Knights had peaked earlier that year but fell rapidly after Haymarket; the group became associated with violence and radicalism. The national movement for an eight-hour day collapsed.8<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nThe American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor. An alliance of craft unions (unions composed of skilled workers), the AFL rejected the Knights\u2019 expansive vision of a \u201cproducerist\u201d economy and advocated \u201cpure and simple trade unionism,\u201d a program that aimed for practical gains (higher wages, fewer hours, and safer conditions) through a conservative approach that tried to avoid strikes. But workers continued to strike.\r\n\r\nIn 1892, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck at one of Carnegie\u2019s steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania. After repeated wage cuts, workers shut the plant down and occupied the mill. The plant\u2019s operator, Henry Clay Frick, immediately called in hundreds of Pinkerton detectives, but the steel workers fought back. The Pinkertons tried to land by river and were besieged by the striking steel workers. After several hours of pitched battle, the Pinkertons surrendered, ran a bloody gauntlet of workers, and were kicked out of the mill grounds. But the Pennsylvania governor called the state militia, broke the strike, and reopened the mill. The union was essentially destroyed in the aftermath.9<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nStill, despite repeated failure, strikes continued to roll across the industrial landscape. In 1894, workers in George Pullman\u2019s Pullman car factories struck when he cut wages by a quarter but kept rents and utilities in his company town constant. The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene Debs, launched a sympathy strike: the ARU would refuse to handle any Pullman cars on any rail line anywhere in the country. Thousands of workers struck and national railroad traffic ground to a halt. Unlike in nearly every other major strike, the governor of Illinois sympathized with workers and refused to dispatch the state militia. It didn\u2019t matter. In July, President Grover Cleveland dispatched thousands of American soldiers to break the strike, and a federal court issued a preemptive injunction against Debs and the union\u2019s leadership. The strike violated the injunction, and Debs was arrested and imprisoned. The strike evaporated without its leadership. Jail radicalized Debs, proving to him that political and judicial leaders were merely tools for capital in its struggle against labor.10<\/sup><\/a> But it wasn\u2019t just Debs. In 1905, the degrading conditions of industrial labor sparked strikes across the country. The final two decades of the nineteenth century saw over twenty thousand strikes and lockouts in the United States. Industrial laborers struggled to carve for themselves a piece of the prosperity lifting investors and a rapidly expanding middle class into unprecedented standards of living. But workers were not the only ones struggling to stay afloat in industrial America. American farmers also lashed out against the inequalities of the Gilded Age and denounced political corruption for enabling economic theft.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"\" Two women strikers on picket line during the \u201cUprising of the 20,000\u201d, garment workers strike, New York City, 1910. Library of Congress<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nFor more information on Labor and Capital of the Gilded Age, please watch the following video:<\/strong>\r\n\r\nWGBH Educational Foundation. Capital and Labor: A Biography of America. Produced by Annenberg Learner. 2000. Video,<\/a> 25:51.\r\n