Donnelly
APUSH
Chapter 16: America's Gilded Age, 1870–1890
Lecture Transcript:
Part 1
In 1886, the Statue of Liberty, meant to celebrate the friendship between France and
the United States and the triumph of freedom in the Civil War, was dedicated in New
York harbor. The statue, which welcomed generations of immigrants to the United
States, came to symbolize American freedom. But 1886 also saw one of the greatest
waves of strikes and labor protests and violence in the nation’s history, events
which exposed deep social divisions in an industrializing society. The questions of
what social conditions enabled freedom and what role the government should play
in defining and protecting the rights of citizens took center stage
In the late nineteenth century, the United States experienced perhaps the fastest and
most far-reaching economic revolution in history. Abundant natural resources, a
growing labor supply and market for manufactured goods, and new capital for
investment all fostered massive economic expansion. The federal government also
spurred industrial and agricultural development by enacting tariffs protecting U.S.
industry from foreign competition, giving land to railroads, and using the army to
remove Indians from western lands wanted by farmers and mining companies.
Every region except the South saw a rapid expansion of manufacturing, mining, and
railroad construction, ending an earlier America based on small farms and artisan
workshops. By 1913, the United States produced a third of the world’s entire
industrial output. Half of all industrial workers labored in plants with more than
250 employees. By 1890, two-thirds of Americans worked for wages, making
dreams of economic independence—owning a farm or workshop—unattainable for
most. Between 1870 and 1920, a new working class developed, with 11 million
Americans moving from farm to city and 25 million immigrating from overseas.
Most new jobs were in industrial cities, whose rapid growth was best symbolized by
New York, a city whose banks and stock exchange financed railroads, mines, and
factories, thus sponsoring industrialization and westward expansion. The Great
Lakes region was the center of industrialization, with iron, steel, machinery,
chemicals, and food production in large cities like Pittsburgh and Chicago and
countless smaller cities.
Railroads enabled the “second industrial revolution.” Private investment and huge
grants of land and money by federal, state, and local governments tripled the
number of miles of rail between 1860 and 1880 and tripled it again over the next
forty years. This opened vast new areas to commercial farming and created a
national market for manufactured goods. By the 1890s, five transcontinental
railroad lines carried western mine, farm, ranch, and forest products to markets in
the East, which in turn made factory goods for the West. Railroads were so critical to
economic growth and the national market that financial crisis in the rail industry
directly shocked the entire national economy.
An expanding population became an ever-larger market for mass production, mass
distribution, and mass marketing of goods, all of which are the basis of a modern
industrial economy. National brands, national stores, and mail-order firms, such as
Sears, Roebuck & Co., emerged for the first time.
Extraordinary technological innovations helped quicken communications and
economic expansion. Telegraph lines crossed the Atlantic to Europe, and the
telephone, typewriter, and handheld camera began to be used in the 1870s and
1880s. Thomas A. Edison’s inventions, such as the phonograph, light bulb, and
motion picture, revolutionized private life, public entertainment, and economic
activity. Edison also created systems for distributing electric power, and soon entire
cities had electricity for homes, factories, and streetcars. Electricity enabled
industrial and urban growth by providing a more dependable and useful source pf
power than water or steam. The newly invented electric motor harnessed the power
of this innovation for industry and households.
Economic growth was remarkable but quite volatile. With markets inundated by
goods and federal monetary policies that removed money from the national
economy and reduced prices, a series of severe economic recessions and
depressions occurred, notably in the 1870s and 1890s. Businesses competed
ruthlessly. To stabilize prices and profits, railroads and other companies formed
“pools” to divide markets and fix prices and “trusts” that allowed a single director to
manage the affairs of several competing companies. But the drive to compete often
quickly disintegrated such schemes. Competition led some firms to control their
entire industry by buying out the competition. Economic concentration culminated
in the great merger wave from 1897 to 1904, in which 4,000 companies were
incorporated into larger corporations that served national markets and thus
wielded immense power. Giant corporations appeared, such as Standard Oil,
International Harvester, and U.S. Steel, which was formed in 1901 by financier J. P.
Morgan out of eight large steel firms.
With no personal or corporate income taxes, some businessmen accumulated
massive wealth and economic power. One such “captain of industry” was Andrew
Carnegie, who emigrated from Scotland as a teenager and labored as a factory
worker and telegraph operator before he used a position with the Pennsylvania
Railroad to build a steel empire. During the 1870’s depression, Carnegie built a
“vertically integrated” steel company—one that controlled every stage of
production, from raw materials to transportation, manufacturing, and distribution.
By the 1890s, Carnegie dominated the steel industry and amassed a fortune of
hundreds of millions of dollars. His steel factories at Homestead, Pennsylvania, were
the most technologically advanced in the world. Although Carnegie’s upbringing
instilled in him a commitment to democracy, social equality, and charity, he ran his
factories ruthlessly.
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More associated with extraordinary wealth was John D. Rockefeller, who rose from
being a merchant clerk to oil industry titan. Through cutthroat competition he
ruined rival oil companies, arranged deals with railroads, and fixed prices and
production. He mastered “horizontal integration,” in which one firm acquires
competing firms, but soon established a vertically integrated company, too, a
monopoly that controlled the drilling, refining, storage, and distribution of oil. By
the 1880s, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company controlled 90 percent of America’s
oil industry.
Such figures and their wealth attracted the admiration and resentment of many
Americans. While many rose from modest circumstances, their wealth, and their
methods for treating workers and conducting business alienated many Americans,
who thought their unregulated actions eroded political and economic freedom and
damaging democracy. In Wealth against Commonwealth, his 1894 exposé of
Standard Oil’s manipulation of markets and bribery of legislators, Henry Demarest
Lloyd wrote that “liberty and monopoly cannot live together.”
The benefits of economic expansion were distributed highly unevenly. For a few
workers, including skilled workers with some control over production processes
such as miners and iron and steel workers, high wages were the norm. Most
industrial workers, however, had semi-skilled jobs that required only managing a
machine. These workers had no control over production and were easily replaced
and dismissed during a strike or economic downturn. Regular and prolonged
unemployment became widespread for these workers, some of whom became
“tramps,” taking to roads and rail to search for employment. Though American
workers earned more than their European counterparts, work was more dangerous
in the United States. And because of the high unemployment and use of public and
private police, most strikes in America failed. Many workers were extremely poor
and relied on family to survive.
Class divisions became more visible in this period as more Americans became
middle class and very wealthy. The rich began to retreat to their own
neighborhoods and built fantastic mansions and estates in the cities and
countryside. A growing number of urban middle-class professionals, office workers,
and small businessmen moved to urban and suburban neighborhoods and used new
streetcars and commuter railways to get to central business districts. By 1890, the
richest 1 percent of Americans received the same total income as the bottom half of
the population and owned more property than the remaining 99 percent. Many
wealthy Americans conspicuously consumed an aristocratic lifestyle of luxury
goods, exclusive clubs, colleges, and social events. Not far from the homes of the
wealthy were the slums of the urban poor. The difference between the two worlds
was captured in Matthew Smith’s 1868 best-seller, Sunshine and Shadow in New
York, which began with an engraving contrasting a $2 million dollar mansion with
the slums. Two decades later, Jacob Riis published a book of photographs, How the
Other Half Lives, documenting the poor’s wretched existence in New York City.
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Part 2
Capitalism advanced most quickly and dramatically in the trans-Mississippi West,
whose lands now became absorbed by white settlement and whose resources
became available for exploitation. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner
delivered a lecture, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” in which
he argued that the frontier had forged American culture’s distinctive qualities:
individual freedom, political democracy, and economic mobility. Turner argued that
the frontier had been a “safety valve,” which drew away the dissatisfied in the East,
and therefore mitigated social unrest. Very influential at the time, Turner’s idea
drew on long-standing notions that the West offered economic opportunity and
freedom to newcomers. Many farmers, gold rush miners, and immigrants did find
economic opportunity in the West, but there the accuracy of Turner’s interpretation
ended. Migrants to the West moved in groups, usually families, not as individuals;
the West was not an empty space but rather was inhabited by Indians, who had to
be dispossessed by whites for the frontier to be settled; and the West was not a
paradise of small farms, but an area with industrial mining and agriculture,
landlords, railroads, Chinese contract laborers, and, until the Civil War, AfricanAmerican slaves.
The West was also not a single area but rather was incredibly diverse, ranging from
the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains, the desert Southwest, the Sierra Nevada,
and the verdant coasts and valleys of California and the Pacific Northwest. Its
incorporation into the United States required the federal government’s intervention.
The government acquired Indian land by purchase or force, regulated territories,
and gave land and money to farmers, railroads, and mining companies. Despite the
myth of the West’s rugged individualism, the area became part of the nation only by
massive government activity.
More land came into cultivation in the thirty years after the Civil War than in the
previous two and a half centuries of American history. Settlers acquired farmlands
through the Homestead Ac, and more bought land from speculators and railroad
companies that had been given public lands by the federal government. A vast
agricultural belt growing wheat and corn for national and international markets
emerged in the Middle Border (Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas), with
a diverse population of farmers who migrated from the East, South, and Europe.
Farming in this region was difficult, and much of the burden fell on women, who
faced severe isolation.
The Middle Border’s arid land required irrigation and thus made family farming
difficult, but despite the emergence of a few large “bonanza farms” with thousands
of acres and many agricultural wage workers, family farms prevailed. These farms
increasingly grew for national and international markets and specialized in one
crop. Railroads brought factory goods to rural farmers, who became more
dependent on banks for loans, machinery, and products and subject to the ups and
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downs of international agricultural prices. American farms thus became part of a
world market, in which farmers across the globe faced ongoing crisis as competition
increased and prices declined.
Western farming’s future was bound up with agricultural enterprises using
irrigation, chemicals, and machines, all of which required capital investments
beyond the means of most family farmers. This future was on display in California,
where huge fruit and vegetable farms, owned by large corporations, were worked
by migrant workers from China, the Philippines, Japan, and Mexico who never
themselves expected to own land.
The decades after the Civil War also saw the golden age of cattle ranching and
cowboys. Railroad stations at Abilene, Dodge City, and Wichita, Kansas, became
destinations for now-legendary cattle drives from Texas. The cowboys who worked
the drives, a diverse group of white, Mexican, and black men, became icons of
freedom and were immortalized in fiction and film. But their life was far from
romantic. They were mostly low-paid wage workers, and the long-distance cattle
drives ended by the 1880s, when farmers fenced in lands with barbed wire and
severe winters killed millions of cattle. The cattle industry that reappeared was
dominated by large ranches close to railroads.
The West was also urban, with large cities such as San Francisco, and the growth of
other cities, like Los Angeles, due to oil. Large corporate enterprises dominated the
West, and particularly in industries such as lumber and mining and as sheep
farming in New Mexico, independent owners and operators gave way to large,
corporate firms.
The West’s incorporation in the American economy sealed the doom of the Plains
Indians and their world. Their lives had already been changed by the horse, and
Indian migrants to the West helped form the nineteenth-century’s great tribes: the
Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Kiowa, and Sioux. Incessant warfare engulfed the tribes
and newcomers. Most whites moving to the Pacific Coast experienced little hostility
from the Plains Indians, but the settlement of lands there in the 1850s and later
brought bloody conflict. Although President Grant declared a “peace policy” in 1869,
warfare soon resumed. Civil War generals like Philip Sheridan attacked the basis of
the Indian economy, destroying villages, horses, and the buffalo to end Indian
resistance. By the 1880s, army campaigns and buffalo hunters had nearly eradicated
the buffalo in the West.
The army subjugated one tribe after another. In 1877, U.S. troops under former
Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner O. O. Howard forced the Nez Percé to surrender
and relocate from Oregon to an Oklahoma reservation. Two years later, Chief Joseph,
that tribe’s leader, delivered a speech in Washington to president Rutherford B.
Hayes and other notables that protested the reservation policy and used the
language of freedom strengthened by the Civil War and Reconstruction: “Let me be a
free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free
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to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think
and talk and act for myself . . .”
Indians sometimes inflicted great costs on American forces, most notably in 1876 at
Little Bighorn, where Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy
Horse killed General George A. Custer and 250 of his men. In the Southwest, the
Apache leaders Cochise and Geronimo attacked white settlers and resisted army
units well into the 1880s, when they surrendered. The Comanche, who had
dominated other Indians in New Mexico and Colorado, also fell to American power
in the 1870s. This resistance only temporarily delayed the advance of white
soldiers, settlers, and miners. Between the end of the Civil War and 1890, eight new
western states joined the Union (Nebraska, Colorado, North and South Dakota,
Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming). The Indians were removed to
reservations throughout the West, where they lived in poverty and were taken
advantage of by traders and government agents.
Indians’ idea of freedom, resting on preserving their cultural and political autonomy
and control of ancestral lands, clashed with the values and interests of most white
Americans. Nearly all believed that the federal government should persuade or force
the Plains Indians to give up their land, religion, communal property, nomadic way
of life, and gender relations and adopt Christianity, private property, and small
farming on reservations, where men would work the fields and women would work
in the home. In 1871, Congress ended the treaty system, in which the government
had negotiated agreements in which Indian tribes were regarded as independent
nations. The Bureau of Indian Affairs established boarding schools where Indian
children, removed from their parents and tribes, were given new names and
educated in white ways.
In 1887, the Dawes Act was passed, which fragmented the lands of nearly all tribes
into small parcels to be given to Indian families, with the rest of the land to be sold
to white buyers. Indians who accepted the farms and “adopted the habits of civilized
life” would be offered American citizenship. Though the policy led to the loss of
much tribal land and the erosion of Indian cultural traditions, whites benefited
enormously, taking much of the best Indian lands, including much of Oklahoma. In
the fifty years after the Dawes Act’s passage, Indians lost 86 million of the 138
million acres they had possessed in 1887. While many nineteenth-century laws and
treaties offered Indians the right to become citizens, few accepted, as most Indians
wanted to retain their tribal identity. Western courts and later the Supreme Court
ruled that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not apply to Native
Americans. By 1900, about 53,000 Indians had become citizens by accepting land
allotments. Most Indians would not be granted citizenship until 1919, after they
served in World War I, or in 1924, when Congress made all Indians citizens.
In the late 1880s, some Indians practiced the Ghost Dance, a religious movement to
revitalize Indian life. Ghost Dance leaders predicted that one day whites would
disappear, the buffalo would return, and Indians would resume their cultural
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practices free from the ills introduced by whites. Large numbers of Indians gathered
for singing, dancing, and religious ceremonies. When the government, fearing a
revolt, sent troops to the reservations, soldiers opened fire on Ghost Dancers at
Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, killing as many as 200 Indians, mostly
women and children. The massacre at Wounded Knee ended four centuries of
armed conflict between native Americans and European settlers and their
descendants. By 1900, the Indian population had reached a nadir of 250,000. But
Indians survived and their numbers grew in the twentieth century.
The conquest of the West was part of a worldwide phenomenon in which settlers
moved into the interior of regions in temperate climates all over the globe, bringing
familiar crops and livestock and starting mining and other industries. Argentina,
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States are thus called “settler
societies” because immigrants from overseas rapidly outnumbered and displaced
original inhabitants, unlike in India and much of colonial Africa, where only a few
Europeans managed to dominate entire societies.
Part 3
The period between 1870 and 1890 is the only time in American history described
in a derogatory way—as the Gilded Age, after the title of an 1873 novel co-authored
by Mark Twain. “Gilded” means covered with a layer of gold, suggesting that the
golden surface deceptively obscures a core of little real value. The Gilded Age thus
referred to the extraordinary economic growth of the period and the corruption
caused by corporate domination of politics, as well as the oppression of others in the
competition for riches.
Americans in this period, in a world in which only a few European governments
extended universal male suffrage, saw their nation as a beacon of democracy. Yet
the power of corporations, which seemed removed from democratic controls, raised
unsettling questions for Americans’ belief that political freedom meant popular selfgovernment. Political corruption was pervasive. New railroad corporations wielded
great influence in state legislatures, and often legislators in the West held stock or
directed mining and lumber companies. Urban politics was often dominated by
corrupt political machines, such as the Tweed Ring in New York, led by “Boss”
William M. Tweed, which both robbed the city of millions of dollars and built
alliances with businessmen and labor, and also provided aid to the urban poor and
unemployed. In national politics, many lawmakers supported bills benefiting
companies in which they had invested or from which they received stock or salaries.
The most famous cases of corruption unfolded during the Grant administration. In
the Crédit Mobilier scandal, a corporation formed by Union Pacific Railroad
stockholders made contracts with itself, at government expense and for huge
profits, and gave stock to influential politicians. And the Whiskey Ring in the Grant
administration united Republicans officials, tax collectors, and whiskey
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manufacturers in a scheme that defrauded the federal government of millions in tax
dollars.
The Civil War’s legacy powerfully shaped national politics and elections.
Republicans found support in the North, Midwest, and agrarian West and among
members of revivalist churches, Protestant immigrants, and blacks. Union veterans’
organizations were a strong Republican base. By the 1890s, pensions for Union
soldiers and their widows and children was the largest item in the federal budget.
After 1877, Democrats dominated the South and found support among Catholics,
especially Irish-Americans, in cities.
The parties were closely divided, and in most presidential elections between 1876
and 1892, the margin separating the major candidates was less than 1 percent of the
popular vote. In 1874, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives,
which started a period of political stalemate in which little new legislation was
passed for twenty years. Only briefly did either party control both the Congress and
the White House. One-term presidents followed: Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, James
A. Garfield in 1881 (succeeded by Chester A. Arthur after his assassination that
year), Grover Cleveland in 1884, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and Cleveland again in
1892. American politics, with high numbers of eligible voters voting and contested
elections, seemed healthy in a number of ways.
Yet the political structure could not effectively confront rapid growth and economic
transformation. The federal government remained small and had limited regulatory
power, compared to today. Both parties became controlled by party managers
closely aligned with business interests. Republicans supported a high tariff to
protect American industry and pursued a fiscal policy based on reducing spending,
paying off the nation’s debt, and withdrawing from circulation all greenbacks—the
paper money issued during the Civil War. The Democrats opposed a high tariff, but
because the leadership was still tied to New York banks and finance, they opposed
demands from their agricultural base for an increase in the money supply. In 1879,
the United States returned to the gold standard (paper currency could again be
exchanged for gold at a fixed rate). Republican economic policies, which reduced
foreign competition in manufacturing and left banks, not the government, to
regulate the money supply, favored eastern industrialists and bankers and
disadvantaged southern and western farmers, who had to pay high prices for
factory goods while prices for their crops dropped.
There were a few reforms in the Gilded Age. In 1883, the Civil Service Act
substituted a merit system for federal employees, which replaced political
appointments with competitive examinations. In 1887, responding to protests
against unfair railroad practices, Congress created the Interstate Commerce
Commission to ensure that rates charged to farmers and merchants were
“reasonable.” The ICC was the first federal agency to regulate the economy, but it
could not itself set rates, and thus had little effect. Though Congress soon passed the
Sherman Antitrust Act, which banned combinations and practices restraining free
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trade, its language was too vague for its laws to be enforced and it also had little
effect.
Though national politics offered few solutions to economic problems, politics was
vibrant and fluid at the state and local levels. After the Civil War, northern state
governments expanded their role in the economy by launching public works
programs that created jobs, and they assumed more responsibility for public health,
education, and welfare. Third parties experienced some success. The GreenbackLabor Party, which proposed that the federal government keep greenbacks in
circulation, thus leaving money for investment and giving the government control
over the money supply, led some local governments in the 1870s.
Protests over railroad policies among farmers and local merchants suffering very
high freight rates led to the formation of the Patrons of Husbandry, known as the
Grange. Founded in 1867, the Grange established cooperatives for storing and
marketing farm goods in order to force railroads to lower their prices. In some
states the Grange pressured state legislatures to investigate railroad rates and, in
some cases, regulate them. A resurgent labor movement also called for economic
regulation, in the form of eight-hour laws limiting the workday. Although a few state
legislatures passed these laws, they lacked means of enforcement and had little
effect.
As the nation industrialized, Americans tried to understand the ways in which their
society was changing. Debates over political economy engaged millions of
Americans, not just economists, politicians, and academics, and thousands of books
and pamphlets were published regarding the ethical and social consequences of
industrialization and highly technical issues such as currency reform and land
taxation. Many Americans believed that something was terribly wrong in the
nation’s social development, and their talk of “better classes” and “dangerous
classes” became the rule as labor strife was recurrent. A number of states and even
Congress established committees to investigate the changing relations between
labor and capital, and many were shocked to learn that employers and workers
distrusted each other and that workers complained of abuse and poverty.
The emergence of a permanent class of wage-earners challenged traditional
American ideas of freedom. Did America still offer opportunities to ordinary citizens
to gain economic independence? To many, it seemed that wage labor was no longer
a temporary condition on the way to economic autonomy, nor did the West seem a
refuge from deprivation in the East. Many Americans saw the concentration of
wealth in this period as natural and a sign of progress, however, and mainstream
economics held that wages were determined by supply and demand and should not
be artificially changed by government or labor unions. The link between freedom
and equality forged in the Revolution and strengthened by the Civil War no longer
seemed relevant. Reformers in the Liberal Republican movement, which challenged
Grant in the 1872 elections, even argued that universal male suffrage was a mistake,
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as the poor and workers might use the vote to threaten property. Instead, they
urged a return to property qualifications for the vote.
The idea that some groups were superior to others, once based in racialized slavery,
now reappeared in a scientific guise as a means to explain the success and failure of
individuals and entire social classes. In 1859, British scientist Charles Darwin
published On the Origins of Species, in which he posited a theory of evolution where
plants and animals best able to adapt to their environment supplanted those less
adaptable. Different thinkers simplified Darwin’s theory and used his language of
“natural selection,” “the struggle for existence,” and “the survival of the fittest” to
address social problems.
According to this school of thought, termed Social Darwinism, evolution was a
natural process in both nature and society. Government could only corrupt society
by regulating the society or economy to the advantage of the poor or workers, who
simply were less able to adapt to changing conditions. Social Darwinists believed
giant corporations had evolved to become dominant in the economy because they
had better adapted and to restrict their operations would be to reverse progress.
The depressions of the 1870s and 1880s did not dislodge popular opinion that the
poor were responsible for their own poverty. In Gilded Age America, nearly half of
all local governments offered no poor relief. Poverty, it was believed, was caused by
a lack of character or absence of self-reliance. Thinkers such as Yale’s William
Graham Sumner argued that no one in a free society could make a claim for help
from any other person, including through government assistance.
Social Darwinism helped spread a “negative” definition of freedom, limited
government and unrestrained free markets, which became popular among business
and professional classes in the late nineteenth century. The idea of contract was
central to this definition of freedom. Labor contracts reconciled freedom and
authority in the workplace, and as long as independent individuals freely contracted
with each other, neither government nor unions had a right to interfere with
working conditions. Nor could Americans legitimately complain that they had lost
any freedom. Workers’ demands that government enforce an eight-hour day or
provide unemployment relief struck liberals as a perversion of governmental
authority that threatened liberty. The old idea of free labor as a celebration of the
independent small producer in a society of equality and harmony became a defense
of the unrestrained capitalist market.
The courts played an important role in making liberty of contract essential to ruling
definitions of freedom. The Fourteenth Amendment allowed the federal government
to overturn state laws that violated citizens’ rights. By the 1880s, liberty of contract,
not equality before the law regardless of race, came to define the meaning of this
amendment. State and federal courts regularly struck down state laws that
regulated business, such as maximum hour laws, as an illegal interference with the
rights of employers to use their property as they saw fit and the rights of employees
to choose the conditions of their work. Initially, the Supreme Court accepted laws
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regulating firms that represented a “public interest,” such as railroads. But the
Supreme Court reversed itself, leading to the formation of the Interstate Commerce
Committee (ICC), which lost many of its cases when they were taken to the court.
The courts generally favored businesses whenever they complained of a loss of
economic freedom, struck down laws granting workers rights, and limited the reach
of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Most famously, in Lochner v. New York (1905), the
Supreme Court struck down a state law establishing maximum hours for bakers,
arguing that it interfered with the right of contract between employers and
employees.
Part 4
Public debate in the late nineteenth century, more than any other point in American
history, divided along class lines. The shift from debates over slavery and the status
of former slaves to what one politician called “the overwhelming labor question”
was clear in 1877, when Reconstruction ended and the first national strike began—
the Great Railroad Strike. Railroad workers protesting pay cuts paralyzed rail traffic
in much of the country, militia units tried to force them back to work, and after
troops fired on strikers and killed twenty in Pittsburgh, workers rioted and burned
property and strikes spread to other workplaces. General strikes brought Chicago
and St. Louis to a halt. The events showed a new solidarity among workers and close
ties between the Republican Party and a new class of industrialists. In the aftermath,
the federal government built armories in major cities to help crush future uprisings.
There was a new wave of labor organizing in the 1880s and the Knights of Labor
stood at its center. The Knights were the first labor group to organize unskilled
workers as well as skilled, women and men, and blacks as well as whites (although
the Knights on the West Coast excluded Asian immigrants). In its peak year, 1886,
the Knights had around 800,000 members and involved millions of workers in
strikes, boycotts, and political, social, and educational activities. Labor reformers in
this era presented a wide range of hopes and demands, from anarchism and
socialism to the eight-hour day and a desire for a “cooperative commonwealth.”
They all agreed that new social conditions were highly unequal and required drastic
change. The labor movement challenged the prevailing definition of freedom as
liberty of contract, arguing that Americans had lost control over their livelihoods
and their government.
Not just workers were dissatisfied with social conditions. A sense of alarm at social
changes wrought by industrial capitalism spread through all classes. Social thinkers
offered many different ideas and blueprints for change, and at the end of the
nineteenth century, an unprecedented number of utopian and dystopian novels
were published, including Caesar’s Column, by Ignatius Donnelly, in which
civilization was destroyed in a brutal war between workers and businessmen. The
most popular books offering remedies for the unequal distribution of wealth were
Progress and Poverty (1879), by Henry George, The Cooperative Commonwealth
(1884), by Laurence Gronlund, and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). All
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three books were best-sellers and spoke to the growing belief that American society
was deeply flawed.
Progress and Poverty had no direct influence on policy, but it attracted more
attention than any other book on economics in American history. In the 1850s and
1860s, Henry George had witnessed the monopolization of land in California. His
book suggested that the major problem facing America was the growth of poverty
alongside material progress, and his solution was the “single tax,” which would
replace all other taxes with a tax on increases in land values. The single tax would be
so high that it would prevent land speculation in the city and countryside. Although
not all embraced his solution, many people were stirred by his identification of the
social problem.
Gronlund’s book, The Cooperative Commonwealth, was the first to popularize
socialism for an American audience. Socialism—the idea that private control of
economic enterprises should be replaced by government ownership in order to
ensure a fairer distribution of the benefits of the wealth produced—was a major
political force in western Europe in the late nineteenth century. But in the United
States, where private property was seen as essential to individual freedom,
socialism was mostly confined to immigrants, whose foreign language writings
reached few people. Gronlund was the first to Americanize socialism. While Karl
Marx had predicted that socialism would be achieved through a working-class
revolution, Gronlund believed it would be achieved by peaceful evolution, and thus
made it seem more acceptable to middle-class Americans terrified by class conflict
and the prospect of social revolution.
Socialism was not popular until the early twentieth century, but Gronlund’s work
prepared an audience for Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which promoted socialism,
even as Bellamy eschewed that term by calling his socialism “nationalism.” In
Bellamy’s utopian novel, a man falls asleep in 1888 and awakes in the year 2000, in
a world in which cooperation has replaced class conflict and economic competition
and in which inequality and liberty as defined by liberty of contract had been
banished. Bellamy insisted freedom was a social condition, resting on
interdependence, not autonomy. Bellamy’s highly authoritarian utopia—everyone
would be conscripted into a Great Industrial Army controlled by a single,
government operation—is chilling today, but it inspired hundreds of Nationalist
clubs, whose members sought the abundance of industrial capitalism without its
inequalities.
The clergy also became a source of criticisms of Social Darwinism and laissez-faire
notions of freedom. While most Protestant preachers continued to attack individual
sin, a new Social Gospel took shape in the writings of men like Walter
Rauschenbausch, a New York Baptist minister, and Washington Gladden, a
Congregational clergyman in Columbus Ohio. They argued that freedom and
spiritual self-development required an equalization of wealth and power and that
unregulated capitalism degraded Christian brotherhood. Adherents tried to minister
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to the needs of the urban poor and attacked child labor and promoted better
working-class housing and health and safety laws.
The social conflicts of the age seemed to culminate in the great labor uprisings of
1886. Western railroad unions’ successful strike against lines controlled by Jay
Gould, a powerful financier, inspired workers to join the Knights of Labor by the
hundreds of thousands. On May 1, 1886, 350,000 workers across the country went
on strike and protested for the eight-hour day. May 1, known as May Day, thereafter
became an annual holiday of parades and protests by workers around the world.
In Chicago, where a vibrant labor movement brought together radical socialists and
anarchists, immigrant workers, and native-born antimonopoly laborites, a strike by
iron moulders at the giant McCormick plant that produced agricultural machinery
turned violent. Company strikebreakers and private police battled the strikers, and
on May 3, 1886, four strikers were killed by police. A rally held the next day to
protest their deaths ended in a bomb explosion—to this day, no one knows the
identity of the bomber—and police opened fire, leading to the deaths and injury of
more police and bystanders. Police in Chicago and elsewhere used the bombing as
an opportunity to arrest and suppress labor radicals. The McCormick strike ended in
defeat, and eight anarchists, mostly immigrants, were charged with the bombing.
With little evidence and flawed proceedings, they were convicted. Four were
hanged, one committed suicide, and the remaining three were imprisoned until their
sentences were commuted several years later. The “Haymarket martyrs” soon
became symbols of labor’s bloody struggle for rights in America.
The Haymarket affair took place amid multiple efforts across the country by
workers, mostly in the Knights of Labor, to run candidates and organize workerbased parties at the local and state levels. The most celebrated campaign took place
in 1886 in New York, where Henry George ran for mayor on the United Labor ticket
and almost defeated the Democratic candidate. The events of 1886 suggested that
labor might become a powerful political force. In fact, the Knights of Labor quickly
declined after 1886, unions began to avoid politics, and the Democrats and
Republicans proved successful at winning workers’ votes. Nevertheless, the events
of the Gilded Age marked a contest over freedom and its social conditions between
the forces of Social Darwinism and laissez-faire and those who supported collective
efforts to establish industrial freedom.
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