CHAPTER 4

The Sorrows of Labor

Throughout the Gilded Age the specters of poverty and oppression waited on the banquet of expansion and opportunity. Economist Henry George compared the want of the huddled masses with the wealth of the dominant plutocracy. In his pioneer work, Progress and Poverty (1879), he conceded that the Industrial Revolution had increased wealth and improved and distributed comfort, leisure, and refinement. But he emphasized that the lowest class was excluded from these gains. ‘There is a vague but general feeling of disappointment; an increased bitterness among the working classes; a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution.”

Between 1865 and 1900 more and more workers were drawn into factories, foundries, and mills on the same low terms as common laborers. The total number of people employed in manufacturing increased from 1.3 million to 4.5 million. The number of factories or sweatshops rose from 140,000 to 512,000. In factories, foundries, and mills wages were low, hours of work long, and conditions unhealthy. Millions were denied the basic amenities that their own labor made possible for others. Their impoverished status seemed to contradict the economic prosperity of the business and industry they were creating. Progress and poverty were, apparently, inseparable.

Eugene Debs (1855-1926), leader of the American Railway Union, who organized a secondary boycott of railway workers during the Pullman strike of 1894. When the adversaries proved stronger and the strike collapsed, Debs, convinced that social justice could only proceed from socialist politics, founded the Socialist Party of America and ran for president five times. Caught here in a pensive mood in 1908, Debs’s fervor is apparent and this, allied to insouciant charm, made him a formidable opponent of the two main parties. (Library of Congress.)

Workers had as much right to their guilds as had industrialists and capitalists of a Gilded Age. No one has put the case for unions better than Utopian socialist Edward Bellamy in his influential Looking Backward of 1888. Reviewing the drive for industrial monopolies, he argued: “The individual laborer, who had been relatively important to the small employer, was reduced to insignificance and powerlessness against the great corporation, while at the same time the way upward to the grade of employer was closed to him. Self-defense drove him to union with his fellows.” However, in the United States the development of trade unions was more hesitant and much slower than in western Europe. No strong working class movement emerged to complement the increasing concentration of capital and industry. By the end of the nineteenth century, the dominant form of trade unions was craft unions restricted to skilled artisans.

Trade-union development was retarded by a number of factors. Labor unions existed to promote the interests of their members by securing better conditions, hours, and wages for workers. But, even without unions, the conditions of artisans were improving. Workers’ general indifference to unions was compounded by immigration on a massive scale. Immigrants, glad of any opportunity, proved a plentiful source of cheap labor. The steady stream of immigrants could always replace dissatisfied workers who went on strike or even joined a union. Their presence thus placed native workers at a disadvantage in their fumbling attempts at collective bargaining. The very fact that the work force was so heterogeneous made it difficult to establish class consciousness, let alone working class solidarity.

As the business of a particular industry became nationwide, its costs, wages, and prices rose and fell in accordance with economic conditions across the country. New technology divided labor as surely as it divided and simplified different industrial processes. Unskilled novices could replace skilled mechanics—and at a lower wage. Dramatic oscillations in the business cycle between prosperity and depression hit at unions in two ways. Depression diminished workers’ ability to support labor organization; prosperity dampened their enthusiasm. No sooner had unions grown in strength and assurance than both industry and labor were struck by the panic of 1873 and the ensuing depression. Both recovered in the 1880s, only to succumb to a much worse depression in 1893. The determination of new industrial entrepreneurs to outwit labor was Complemented by the conservative attitude of courts and public opinion to the new cause. Farmers and agricultural workers were preoccupied with their own sectional interests and were too narrow-minded to appreciate that the cause of labor was, in part, their cause as well.

The growth of national unions was marked by three stages: the National Labor Union (NLU) in 1866; the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor (the Knights) in 1869; the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886. They provided, respectively, the backdrop, procession, and ceremony for the exciting drama of labor disputes that occupied the center stage. Until the Civil War strikes had been short, local, and peaceful. Thereafter the United States had to endure long, widespread, and violent industrial strife. In particular five violent strikes damaged the reputation of unions: the Molly Maguires’ in the 1870s, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket affair of 1886, Homestead in 1892, and Pullman in 1894. These five incidents corresponded to the five acts of a classical tragedy: exposition, development, crisis, denouement, and catastrophe.

National Labor Union

In the 18 60s and 1870s the most durable labor organizations were the traditional local unions and city trade assemblies. It is not coincidence that the movement for national federation was led by men from those factory crafts that had already established national unions: William Sylvis of the molders and Jonathan Finer and Ira Steward of the machinists. By 1873 there were twenty-five national unions with a membership of 170,000. Another 130,000 workers were members of unions that lacked a national association.

Captain William R. Jones, superintendent of the Edgar Thomson Steelworks, commented on the skill of English workers in mobilizing the labor force. He observed in 1875 that they “are great sticklers for high wages, small production and strikes.” In almost every industry it was British and Irish immigrants who founded the labor union: in coal mining, John Rae, Robert Watchorn, John Hinchcliffe, David McLaughlin, and John Siney; in textiles, George Gunton and Robert Howard; in iron and steel, John Jarrett.

As wartime prosperity evaporated, labor leaders found it more difficult to gain advantages from collective bargaining. Nor were they ready to risk cooperative ventures. They sought an alternative. The eight-hour day became a popular demand among the rank and file. Indeed, it forms a continuous thematic thread running through labor history in the Gilded Age. The prophet of the eight-hour millennium was a Boston machinist, Ira Steward, “the eight-hour monomaniac.” He believed that increased leisure with the same wages would encourage workers to consume more industrial goods and thus lead to an increase in industrial growth. Steward’s central argument was propagated in a popular jingle attributed to his wife:

Whether you work by the piece or work by the day

Decreasing the hours increases the pay.

Not only did workers believe that a shorter working day would improve their health, welfare, and opportunities for education and advancement, but they also thought that a reduction in hours would spread work more evenly in a recession and thus protect jobs.

Union leaders required some sort of new organization to unify the eight-hour movement. In the summer of 1866 they called a congress of labor organizations at Baltimore for August. There seventy-seven delegates representing 60,000 workers launched the National Labor Union. It had a program of reform including workers’ cooperatives managed by producers and consumers alike. It also wanted a federal Department of Labor and the disposal of public lands only to actual settlers.

On the surface, it seemed that the NLU was successful in promoting the eight-hour day. Six states enacted eight-hour laws in 1867: California, Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin, and New York. However, in the first four the law excepted companies that issued labor contracts stipulating longer hours. In Wisconsin the law applied only to women and children. In New York, Governor Reuben Fenton refused to enforce it. A report to the NLU could well describe the states’ eight-hour laws as “frauds on the laboring class.” Sylvis’s successor as president of the NLU, Richard Trevellick, prevailed upon Senator B. Gratz Brown of Missouri to introduce a bill granting an eight-hour day to laborers and mechanics working for the federal government. It passed Congress in June 1868. But federal departments then reduced wages by 20 percent as well as hours. However, in an executive order of May 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant condemned such reductions in pay, and Congress enacted a law compensating federal employees for their loss in wages since 1868. In addition, the NLU attempted to address its conventions to the special problems of women and African-Americans.

During the war industrialists began to employ an ever larger number of women in factories and sweatshops. They were paid less and treated worse than men. The most significant protective society for women was the Working Women’s Protective Union, founded at the instigation of Moses Beach, editor of the New York Sun. It offered legal advice and ran a placement bureau which trained women for occupations that were underemployed. The labor movement generally opposed the use of women in industry as unfair competition, forcing women to found their own labor unions even in trades where they worked side by side with men. Thus, for example, there were Daughters as well as Knights of St. Crispin.

However, since union leaders recognized that their real antagonists were the employers, they gave tacit approval to attempts to secure higher wages for women for fewer hours. Nevertheless, it was only after bitter debate that the NLU consented to admit suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Mary Kellogg Putnam, and Mary MacDonald as delegates to the congress of 1868. In 1869 it refused to seat Anthony because she had allowed the Protective Union to be used to break strikes. Thereafter male support for women’s unions declined. Employers could harass women’s unions with impunity. Their main weapon was ridicule. In 1869 Kate Mullaney, second vice-president of the NLU, led a strike of collar laundresses of Troy, New York. They were protesting long hours of work in temperatures of 100 degrees for only $2 or $3 per week. Their employers had a ready reply. They produced a new paper collar requiring fewer laundresses. The strike collapsed. By 1872 most women’s unions had disappeared.

The migration of African-Americans from the South to the North intensified racial attitudes among white workers in northern industries. They resented the willingness of African-Americans to work for lower wages and their enforced lower standard of living. They were even hostile to Negro suffrage. African-Americans, starting with dock workers in Baltimore, Charleston, and Savannah, began to form separate labor unions throughout the South. In 1869 Isaac Myers, a Baltimore calker, sought and attained the admission of nine African-American associations to the NLU. William Jessup, president of the New York State Workingmen’s Assembly, and Alfred W. Phelps, head of the carpenters, tried to persuade national unions to receive African-American mechanics. However, racial prejudice was too strong. Whites argued that African-Americans would fail the labor movement by accepting lower pay and by working as strikebreakers.

African-American leaders created a National Colored Labor Union in December 1869. Its platform emphasized the problem of racial discrimination. Its proposed remedy was African-American workers’ cooperatives. In 1870 Isaac Myers tried to recruit and organize African-American workers throughout the South. He wanted to ensure they would never be ousted from skilled trades and left as “the sweepers of shavings, the scrapers of pitch and the carriers of mortar.” He also sought full affiliation with the NLU for unions of African-American workers. Thus he needed to prove African-American commitment and responsibility to the labor movement. However, the NLU Congress that year decided in favor of a separate labor association for African-Americans, whereupon the National Colored Labor Union broke off relations.

Inspired by Sylvis, the NLU tried to follow his strategy of workers’ cooperatives. The idea was to turn workers into self-employed producers and to free labor from its servitude to capital. Individual unions, among them the bakers, carpenters, coopers, hatters, printers, shipwrights, and shoemakers, tried to make a success of cooperatives. All failed. They found it almost impossible to obtain credit. This problem led the NLU to recognize that labor could never help itself without a reform of the currency. This in turn led it into an ill-advised, ill-fated alliance with the Greenback movement.

The origins of the Greenback movement go back as far as 1848 when Edward Kellogg, a New York merchant, argued that existing monetary laws favored banks but oppressed labor. Kellogg wanted the government to issue money at 1 percent interest based on real estate. Thus manufacturers and mechanics, planters and farmers alike could obtain money they needed at a rate they could afford. After the war, farm joined factory in the demand for an inflationary policy through the retention of wartime greenbacks. But their motives were different. Farmers wanted to return to their wartime prosperity. Factory workers wanted a fundamental change in the whole financial system. They urged the federal government to transform the public debt into bonds at an interest rate of 3 percent and convertible into a new legal tender based on physical wealth. They believed such a reform would demolish the monopoly of “irresponsible banking associations,” abolish the “robbery of interest rates,” and free the economic system from the gold standard. Thus labor could be assured of its just rewards and natural rights.

In 1872 the NLU took the irrevocable decision and transformed itself into the National Labor Reform party. Its avowed program was reform of the currency. But when its presidential nominee, Judge David Davis of Illinois, withdrew from the federal election he dealt the NLU a mortal blow. It adopted the candidate for dissident Democrats, Charles O’Connor, a Tammany Hall hack. Since the Republicans were divided and the Democrats thirsty for power after fourteen years in the political wilderness, the Labor Reform party still had high hopes for the election. Nevertheless, O’Connor disappointed his allies, capturing fewer than 30,000 votes. The party was well and truly over. Only seven delegates had turned up for the convention of 1872. In the depression of the following year the NLU was a political irrelevance.

Years of Upheaval

The panic of 1873 heralded a prolonged depression. It was estimated that by 1877, 20 percent of the labor force was unemployed, 40 percent worked for only six or seven months a year, and only 20 percent worked regularly. Three million out of work gathered in shantytowns on the fringes of cities. Relief, if it came at all, was irregular, arbitrary, and inadequate. Local unions could not survive. Before the panic there had been thirty national unions. In 1877 the Labor Standard listed nine. Total union membership declined from 300,000 to about 50,000.

The most obvious signs of labor discontent during the 1870s and 1880s were demonstrations by the unemployed and strikes by exploited workers on such a scale that some historians refer to these years as a period of great upheaval. Spontaneous protests led to pitched battles with police and militia, to riots and bloodshed. Labor historian Foster Rhea Dulles concludes, “As never before the nation came to realize the explosive force inherent in the great mass of industrial workers that were the product of its changing economy.” The most notorious riot was that of Tompkins Square in New York on January 13, 1874. It began when a scheduled meeting between unemployed workers and city authorities was canceled by the police at the last minute. When a crowd did assemble, they were charged by a squad of mounted police armed with billy clubs.

Public opinion was far more disturbed by the strike of the Molly Maguires in eastern Pennsylvania. The Molly Maguires was a secret society, named after a redoubtable widow, and formed by tenants in Ireland against their landlords. Its official title was the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The clandestine organization in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania was its natural American successor. It was incorporated as a “humane, charitable, and benevolent organization” in 1871.

The tribulations of the miners were real enough. Miners endured worse conditions than workers in industry. They had no legal protection from industrial accidents. Between 1865 and 1875, 556 men were killed in the anthracite fields and 1,565 were maimed for life. In 1868 they formed a new Pennsylvania coal union, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association of St. Clair, led by John Siney. About 85 percent of the anthracite miners joined. In 1870 its dispute with mine owners was resolved by the “Gowen compromise,” proposed by Franklin Benjamin Gowen, president of the Reading Railroad. In the future, miners’ wages were to be adjusted on a sliding scale in accordance with the price of coal.

But when prices and wages fell dramatically that winter, a new strike began in January 1871. A series of terrorist acts followed—arson and sabotage of property, assault and murder of personnel. The exact part played by the Mollies in all this has remained a mystery. Gowen certainly believed that his coal empire was being undermined by the Mollies, and he was determined to destroy them. As early as 1872 he accepted an offer of help from detective Allan Pinkerton. Pinkerton was a Scottish immigrant who had resigned from the Chicago police to found the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1850. At first he specialized in cases of railway theft. During the war he served the North as a military intelligence officer. Beginning in 1865 he began to transform the scope of the agency’s activities. He now offered intelligence, counter intelligence, and internal security services to both business and government. These services included strikebreaking.

Allan Pinkerton chose James McParlan, a twenty-nine-year-old immigrant from Ulster, for the delicate and dangerous task of infiltrating the Mollies. On October 27, 1873, McParlan began to move from town to town in the Pennsylvania coal fields posing as a fugitive from a murder charge in Buffalo. A man of easy charm, he had no difficulty in ingratiating himself with the Irish mining community and soon discovered that the Mollies’ headquarters was at Pottsville, where he was initiated into the order on April 13, 1874. They were so taken with his ease at reading and writing that they made him secretary of the Shenan-doah Lodge. This post afforded a good cover for his secret reports.

In December 1874 mine owners led by Go wen reduced wages below the agreed-on minimum standard. In January 1875 the miners, led by John F. Walsh, retaliated by going on strike. According to sensational press accounts, the Molly Maguires had intimidated miners who wanted to go back to work and prevented them from doing so. They were supposedly terrorizing the coal fields with murder and mayhem. Contemporary historian Francis P. Dewees, in The Molly Maguires (1876), described the Mollies’ activities as “a reign of blood. . . . They held communities terror bound, and wantonly defied the law, destroyed property and sported with human life.” It was discovered much later that the managers themselves had instigated various attacks on their own mines as a pretext for crushing all unions. The way the strike was actually suppressed suggests that this really was the case. Whatever crime wave already existed, it was certainly intensified by the arrival of the Pinker-tons. On April 28, 1875, Pinkerton and Gowen agreed to support Mc-Parlan with a reserve of six Pinkerton detectives and some railroadmen. They would constitute “a flying squadron,” a mobile police force, able to assemble anywhere a crime was about to be committed in order to gather evidence to be used later in court.

Miners could continue the strike for several months because, although they were not being paid, they were allowed food on credit by stores friendly to their cause. But by May 1875 the stores were no longer willing to accept the financial risk of an indefinite strike and refused further credit. Union leaders tried to avert disaster by offering the mine operators a deal. They would forgo the old sliding scale in exchange for a flat weekly wage of $15 for six eight-hour shifts. The operators had no reason to give in. They said they would reopen the mines and offer work and protection to any miner who returned. Italian strikebreakers were taken to Clearfield County in western Pennsylvania in sealed boxcars like cattle. Strikebreakers were sealed off from strikers, not to protect them from harm, but to prevent them from hearing the strikers’ case. Sometimes immigrants were not even told they had been hired as strikebreakers until they arrived on the scene. Their success in bringing the miners to heel contributed to the decline of some unions.

In early 1876 McParlan became principal witness for the prosecution in the trial of Mollies accused of the murders of mine boss Thomas Sanger and his boarder, William Uren, on September 1, 1875, at Raven Run. His testimony at subsequent trials was corroborated by other witnesses who turned state’s evidence to save their own hides. Much of their evidence was false. As a result, all twenty-four of the Molly Ma-guires who had been indicted were convicted. Nineteen were hanged for murder. The others were given prison sentences ranging from two to seven years. The “King of the Mollies,” Jack Kehoe, was among those found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. After losing a desperate legal battle to save his life, he died a torturous death. The noose on the gallows slipped. He strangled slowly and died in great agony. The plight of the miners remained the same as before. The strikers were routed. The secret society was shattered. The Miners’ Benevolent Association was broken. Not until 1890, when the United Mine Workers was formed, did miners achieve an effective union. And only in 1900 was their formidable leader, Johnny Mitchell, ready to pit miners against mines in well-organized strikes.

Local violence in the winter of 1874–75 was only a prelude to widespread disorder in the summer of 1877. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was a dramatic revolt. A difficult situation was compounded by the hostility of railroad entrepreneurs to anything beyond their own immediate gain. Moreover, workers were dismayed by the failure of labor unions to help them. Their strike was a blind gesture of embittered defiance against a capitalistic society willfully insensitive to human needs.

Railroad work sometimes involved shifts of fifteen or even eighteen hours at a stretch. Railroad workers had suffered average wage cuts of 35 percent over the three years to 1877. That year the Pennsylvania Railroad announced a further reduction of 10 percent to take effect on June 1. Other eastern railroads announced similar cuts, effective July 1. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The workers were thoroughly aroused. On July 16, 1877, forty firemen and brakemen of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad went on strike at Camden Junction, Maryland. They were dispersed by police. The following day there was a second strike at Martinsburg, West Virginia. This time the strikers took the precaution of seizing the depot to keep trains from moving until their full wages were restored. Their leaders were arrested by police but released by a large crowd. The affair ended only after President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered 200 federal troops to the scene.

At first public opinion sided with the strikers. For one thing, the general public had endured much from the railroads in their selfish policies toward consumers. Everyone knew that the wage cuts were arbitrary and that, despite the recession, high dividends were still being paid on watered stock. But soon the strike was widespread. The action of employees of the Pennsylvania Railroad at Pittsburgh on July 19 led to a terrifying riot. When 650 federal troops arrived from Philadelphia, they fired into the crowd, killing 25 people and wounding more in order to capture the roundhouse and machine shops. It was now the turn of the strikers to besiege the soldiers. They set freight cars afire and sent them into the roundhouse. When it was ablaze, the soldiers fought their way out and beat a quick retreat. The way was clear for wanton destruction of railroad property by the mob, now swelled to 4,000 to 5,000 by hoodlums and vagrants. They broke up the cars and tore up the tracks. What they could not destroy in this way they set on fire. In the conflagration 500 cars, 104 locomotives, and 39 buildings, including the depot, were destroyed. Newspapers across the country sensationalized the uprising with headlines like “Pittsburgh Sacked—the City Completely in the Power of a Howling Mob.” To the New York Times of July 26, 1877, the strikers were now “hoodlums, rabble, bummers, looters, blacklegs, thieves, tramps, ruffians, incendiaries, enemies of society, brigands, rapscallions, riffraff, felons and idiots.”

All along the line towns and cities were given over to riots—Altoona, Easton, Harrisburg, Reading, Johnstown, Bethlehem, and Philadelphia—and freight was immobilized. As federal troops entered city after city rioting subsided and strikers returned to work. They were beaten and they knew it. Nothing was done to assuage their grievances. By August 2, 1877, the railroads had had what was left of their property restored to them. Damage to them and other property owners cost more than $10 million to repair.

The crisis had lasted a month, the consequences were felt for several years to come. The conflict involved more people than any other labor dispute in the nineteenth century. It seemed to the upper and middle classes like a slave uprising—miners in Martinsburg and Scranton, millhands in Pittsburgh, sewermen in Louisville, and stevedores in Cairo, Illinois, as well as small businessmen and farmers across the country had actively assisted the strike. The business community resolved to suppress labor associations by every possible means. In its editorial of August 2, 1877, the Nation explained that it was necessary to be cruel in order to be kind:

The kindest thing which can be done for the great multitudes of untaught men . . . is to show them promptly that society as here organized, on individual freedom of thought and action, is impregnable, and can be no more shaken than the order of nature. The most cruel thing is to let them suppose, even for one week, that if they had only chosen their time better, or had been better led or better armed, they would have succeeded in forcing it to capitulate.

In turn labor was convinced that the hostility engendered by the strike virtually precluded further strikes for the time being. Therefore, labor must advance its cause by outright political activity. But although labor had lost the first round it had begun to realize its potential strength.

The Haymarket Affair

The contemporaneous history of American socialism provides variations on the theme of the rise of American labor. Indeed, the entire labor movement was discredited in grim accounts about the subversive activities of anarchists and socialists. They rose to a torrent of abuse in reports of the Haymarket affair of 1886.

In 1864 Karl Marx founded the International Workingmen’s Association in London. At that time Marx’s strategy to achieve a socialist state was for the workers to organize trade unions first and producers’ cooperatives later. They could then organize themselves politically and seize control of the government. Ferdinand Lassalle, however, wanted to do things the other way around: first political, then economic control. A small group of his followers formed the German Workingmen’s Union in New York in October 1865. In 1868 they reconstituted themselves the Socialist party with Friedrich A. Sorge as president. They fared badly in the elections that year and decided to infiltrate other associations. Accordingly, they formed Union 5 of the National Labor Union and Section 1 of the International Workingmen’s Association. Both remained minuscule sects. Marxism and socialism did not arouse the sort of mass enthusiasm enjoyed by indigenous protests for greenbacks, free silver, or the tax on wealth.

However, American intellectuals were attracted to the International, including William West, former president of the New England Working-men’s Association, who organized Sections 9 and 12. Section 12 was penetrated by two sisters, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, who were ultra-feminists. Their beliefs were sensationalized by the press, which made the International look morally outrageous and politically ridiculous. Bad publicity and philosophical differences divided it further. Twenty-two sections, mainly composed of immigrants, formed the North American Federation and were recognized as legitimate by the International Congress at the Hague in 1872. Thirteen sections formed the American Confederation, which did not gain recognition and dwindled into obscurity.

In 1872 the International in Europe foundered on differences between Marx and anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and moved its organization to New York. This precipitated a struggle for leadership among various sections in the city that was resolved only when several sections were expelled. These joined forces with groups from Newark and Philadelphia to form the Social Democratic Party of America. Among the leaders were cigarmaker Adolph Strasser and carpenter Peter J. McGuire. But it was only through union and unanimity that the socialists could possibly hope to make headway. They held a congress in Philadelphia in July 1876 which founded the Socialist Labor party. It was supposed to give priority to trade union activity. However, its political agitators were quite carried away by their successes in various municipal elections in New Haven, Milwaukee, and Chicago in 1876 and 1877. Once again it seemed the socialist movement was about to dissolve. Only the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 saved it.

Socialists buried their differences and cooperated with the strikers. In Chicago the Workingmen’s party tried to seize the initiative; in St. Louis they succeeded for a time. In Reign of the Rabble (1966) David Burbank concludes that “no American city has come so close to being ruled by a workers’ soviet, as we would now call it, as St. Louis, Missouri, in the year 1877.” But they soon found themselves isolated. Their executive committee was arrested on charges of conspiracy and four members were sentenced to five years in the state penitentiary and fined $2,000.

The failure of the railroad strike convinced practically the whole labor movement it should now concentrate on political action. Thus the political wing of the Socialists gained the ascendancy at the Newark convention of December 1877. From its new headquarters in Cincinnati the Socialist Labor party concentrated its efforts on winning state and municipal elections in New York, Chicago, and St. Louis in 1878 and 1879. Any success was short-lived. Socialist leaders, attempting to play both ends against the middle, failed miserably. Trade unionists within and without the party were not entirely convinced by its arguments. Diehard socialists suspected its integrity. When the leaders allied themselves with the Greenbackers in 1880 they shattered the whole socialist movement. By 1883 the Socialist Labor party had no more than 1,500 members divided among rival factions.

Yet they were still capable of rallying to a cause. This time the avowed aim was revolution. At a Chicago convention of October 1881 these minuscule sects constituted the Revolutionary Socialist party. But although they endorsed the aims of the International Working People’s Association, or Black International, they rejected political action themselves in favor of economic action through trade unions. The eastern wing was anarchist. Its leader, Johann Most, prophesied a society in which the state would be replaced by a federation of producers’ cooperatives. He advocated propaganda by deed, execution of capitalists, and seizure of their estates. The “Chicago idea” of native-born American Albert Parsons and German immigrant August Spies was syndicalism based on existing trade unions. Unions were not to contend for higher wages and shorter hours. These would be superficial gains. They were to work for the overthrow of capitalist society. Socialism was about to face its first major crisis in the United States.

Few events have had such national and international repercussions as the Haymarket bomb outrage of 1886. There has been no equivalent in the twentieth century. To get some idea of the public hysteria it generated one would have to imagine such events as the Great Red Scare of 1917–1921, the election of 1928, and the case of Sacco and Vanzetti that came in between, all happening in a single month instead of being spread over a decade.

The Black International had perhaps 2,000 members in Chicago. They were mainly German and Polish immigrants who worked in the metal, cabinet, and packing industries. Its publication, Alarm, preached open revolution. Its facility in self-advertisement was to be its undoing. Chicago newspapers in three languages emphasized its supposed threat to society. It persuaded the Progressive Cigar Makers’ Union to create a Central Labor Union there in February 1884. Twenty-two unions joined it in the next two years.

At its Chicago convention on October 7, 1884, the new Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (a politically moderate successor to the defunct NLU) passed a resolution that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886.” Both the Central Labor Union and the Black International committed themselves to the movement. Of course, many employers would not assent to the demand. Across the country some 350,000 workers from 11,562 firms went on strike.

The conservative press had plenty to offer by way of scorn and censure. The Indianapolis Journal of May 3, 1886, was typical in its condemnation by ridicule. “Street parades, red flags, fiery harangues by scoundrels and demagogues, who are living off the savings of honest but deluded men, strikes and threatened violence mark the inauguration of the movement.”

A strike and lockout at the McCormick Harvester Works in Chicago, which had continued since February, precipitated a tragedy. On May 3 a pitched battle took place between strikers, strikebreakers, and police protecting them in front of the plant. When police fired into the crowd several people were killed and many injured.

In protest the anarchists of the Black International called a meeting in Haymarket Square, center of the lumber yards and packing houses, for May 4. Mayor Carter H. Harrison gave his permission. The invitation to attend was an inflammatory document, the so-called revenge circular, composed by August Spies. Its tenor is suggested by a short extract:

The masters sent out their bloodhounds—the police. They killed six of your brothers at McCormick’s this afternoon. They killed the poor wretches because they, like you, had the courage to disobey the supreme will of your bosses. . . . To arms we call you, to arms!

The mayor attended the meeting, discovered it was peaceful, and left. When it began to rain the crowd started to melt away. The mayor had advised John Bonfield, precinct captain, to discharge his police reserves. Instead, Bonfield dispatched a riot squad to the Haymarket. Captain Ward, who was in charge of the squad, ordered the crowd to disperse and had an argument with English immigrant Samuel Fielden, whose address he had interrupted. Someone then threw a bomb that killed one policeman, Sergeant M. J. Degan, and wounded more than sixty, six of whom died later. The police retaliated, again firing into the crowd, wounding more than a hundred people, some fatally.

At first public opinion was quick to blame the anarchists and cite their opinions as proof of guilt. According to Illinois state law anyone inciting murder was also guilty of murder. Altogether seven anarchists were arrested and indicted and a warrant was issued for the eighth, Albert Parsons. Only three (Spies, Parsons, and Fielden) had actually been present in the Haymarket on May 4. Nevertheless, press denunciation was particularly vituperative. On May 6, 1886, the Chicago Tribune declared, “These serpents have been warmed and nourished in the sunshine of toleration until at last they have been emboldened to strike at society, law, order, and government.”

No one could be sure who had thrown the bomb. Rather than making the punishment fit the crime, society wanted to make the criminal do so. It was difficult to credit the sorry-looking group of anarchists with the violence and horror of the Haymarket affair. Most newspapermen had concluded at the time that Louis Lingg had made the fatal bomb and that Rudolph Schnaubelt had thrown it. The fact that Schnaubelt was twice arrested and freed when all other suspected anarchists were detained certainly suggests that the police wanted him out of the way. It is possible they had used him as an agent provocateur. Historian Samuel Yellen’s interpretation is that Captain Bonfield planted sure proof of terrorism so that he could take repressive measures. In an interview published in the Chicago Daily News on May 10, 1889, Chief of Police Ebersold explained that Bonfield’s able lieutenant, Captain Schaack, “wanted to keep things stirring. He wanted bombs to be found here, there, all around, everywhere. . . . After we got the anarchist societies broken up, Schaack wanted to send out men to again organize new societies right away.”

The trial of the accused anarchists began on June 21, 1886, at the criminal court of Cook County before Judge Joseph E. Gary. It was to become a notorious reference point for radicals suspicious of judicial integrity, especially in the trial of the “Chicago Seven” after the Chicago riots that accompanied the controversy-laden Democratic National Convention of 1968.

Julius S. Grinnell, state’s attorney, ignored the usual custom of having jurors chosen at random from names in a box. Instead, he had a special bailiff select men prejudiced against the defendants. One was actually a relative of one of the bomb victims. The evidence against the defendants began with their literature. August Spies was a printer and editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. Articles describing the manufacture of dynamite and bombs and urging comrades to “clean their guns” and have them ready for action were turned against him in court. Moreover, dynamite was found in his office and in the home of another anarchist, George Engel. By means of smear, innuendo, and false testimony, Grinnell convinced the jury that Spies, Schwab, and the missing Schnaubelt had passed a bomb from one to the other at the meeting. On August 20 the jury returned a verdict of guilty for all the defendants and fixed the penalty at hanging for seven of them and life imprisonment for the eighth, Oscar Neebe.

Michael Schwab and Samuel Fielden pleaded for executive clemency and had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Another, Louis Lingg, a twenty-one-year-old carpenter, took his own life in prison, blowing himself up by exploding a stick of dynamite in his mouth. The remaining four—Spies, Parsons, Engel, and Adolph Fischer—were hanged on November 11, 1887. Twenty-five thousand people took part in their funeral procession. Their monument at Waldheim Cemetery became a workers’ shrine.

The case was now a public sensation at home and abroad. In 1889 an amnesty association was founded to campaign for the release of Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab. In 1893 a new progressive governor, John P. Alt-geld, pardoned the three survivors. As he explained in Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab (1893), he was also exonerating them. He accused judge, jury, and prosecution of falling victim to mass hysteria that had been deliberately generated by the police and maliciously intensified by the press. In effect, he was charging the whole community with the murder of justice itself.

Largely because of the Haymarket affair the eight-hour movement of 1886 was a substantial failure. Of the many workers who took part in the movement only 15,000 retained their gains at the end of the year. Employers had drawn much of the impetus for the campaign by buying off 150,000 potential strikers before the general strike began. Once again labor had failed.

The Socialist movement was being baptized by fire. In New York Socialists adopted the name Progressive Democracy and nominated intellectual and social reformer Henry George as mayoral candidate. Widely supported, George took an astonishing 68,000 votes against Democrat Abram S. Hewitt, who won with 90,000 votes, and Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who came third with 60,000. The New York legislature responded by enacting a series of labor laws. It created a board of mediation and arbitration; instituted a ten-hour day for men working on streets and elevated railways, for women, and for children under age fourteen; insisted that goods made by convicts be so labeled; prohibited employers from intimidating union members; and established a code governing the safety and sanitation of tenement buildings. Outside New York the new political movement achieved more. The movement reached its zenith the following spring when labor tickets carried nineteen communities in the Midwest and the city of Chicago. Yet the numbers of people actively involved in socialist organizations remained minute. The weight of the labor movement was now divided between two rival associations, the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor.

The Knights of Labor

The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor was founded by nine tailors in the hall of the American Hose Company in Philadelphia on December 9, 1869. Their leader was Uriah S. Stephens. He wanted to unify all workers in a single order, regardless of color or creed, sex or nationality. Prospective initiates had to undergo searching investigation and ritual before being admitted. The Knights established eighty craft unions in or around Philadelphia within the next two years, among them carpenters and cutters, masons and machinists, blacksmiths and ironworkers. Membership was open to all wage earners but closed to the professions. Retired workers could join, but their number was restricted by quota to a quarter of the membership.

In January 1878 the Knights established a general assembly at a special convention in Reading, Pennsylvania. They adopted the following “First Principles”: direct representation and legislation, the initiative and referendum, establishment of bureaus of labor statistics, taxation of unearned increments in land values, compulsory arbitration of labor disputes, prohibition of child labor, federal ownership of the railroads, the eight-hour day, and free coinage of silver at a ratio of 1 6 to i. It was due to pressure from the Knights and their affiliates that Congress established a Bureau of Labor in 1884. But their ultimate goal was the establishment of “co-operative institutions productive and distributive.” The Knights’ membership fluctuated widely. It rose to 42,000 in 1882 and by 1885 was more than 100,000. Local assemblies mixed skilled and unskilled workers. This was the Knights’ greatest strength and greatest weakness.

In 1879 Terence V. Powderly, a machinist and union organizer who had just been elected labor mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, became grand master workman. The son of Irish Catholic immigrants to Car-bondale, Pennsylvania, he also served as vice president of the Irish Land League, practiced at the bar, and managed a grocery store. Diminutive, dapper, even dainty, Powderly did not look like a determined leader of labor. Yet his political skill was beyond dispute. He was eloquent on platform and paper. By adept manipulation he built up a personal machine that enabled him to dominate the general assembly for fourteen years. Powderly envisioned the skilled defending the unskilled, the strong championing the weak. “An injury to one is the concern for all” was the Knights’ slogan. But this was not how skilled workers saw it. Traditional craft unions had concluded they could make nothing of unskilled labor. They were unwilling to take the risk and join forces. Thus, the conventional unions were opposed to the aims of the Knights from the start. Soon they opposed the association itself.

The Knights played a crucial role in various strikes during the winter of 1883-84. In 1885 militant Knight Joseph R. Buchanan organized discontented workers on the entire Southwest System into local assemblies. The unscrupulous entrepreneur Jay Gould controlled the Southwest System, which included the Wabash. When the Wabash tried to break the local assemblies by firing railway workers who were Knights, the district assembly at Moberley, Missouri, ordered Knights remaining with the Wabash to go on strike. Gould’s entire system was brought to a halt. He was forced to come to terms with the Knights. The impact of his surrender was sensational. As Joseph Rayback puts it, “The Gould strikes made the Knights the undisputed leaders of the labor movement.” In the next few months more local assemblies were formed than in the previous sixteen years. Total membership increased more than seven times to over 700,000, as unskilled and semiskilled workers from mines, railroads, and heavy industry flocked to the association that had beaten Jay Gould. Powderly claimed later that at least 400,000 people came out of curiosity and caused more harm than good.

People expected too much of the Knights, and too much was what they got. As Irish playwright and wit Oscar Wilde remarked, there is only one thing worse than being denied one’s heart’s desire, and that is attaining it. Carried away by past successes, workers continued to press employers and to rely on the national executive to back them up. Employees of the Missouri Pacific and Missouri, Kansas and Texas railroads, who had supported their colleagues in the Wabash strike of 1885, now expected full support from the union in their own claim for higher wages. When a foreman on the Texas and Pacific was dismissed, Master Workman Martin Irons used the incident as a pretext for calling an unofficial strike.

Extravagant demands convinced Jay Gould and his managers that the Knights should be crushed once and for all. He had retreated in 1885 in order to prepare his forces for 1886. As the strike deteriorated into widespread violence, Powderly was obliged to condone in public those actions he condemned in private. This time there was no chance of negotiation. Gould and his allies were adamant. People interpreted the strike as an attempt to violate the rights of business and were as intransigent in their hostility to the strikers as they had been to Gould the year before.

In the last six months of 1886 about 100,000 workers were involved in labor disputes in other industries. The outcome was much the same everywhere. The Knights were most discredited by an abortive strike in the Chicago stockyards over the eight-hour day. Powderly intervened at a critical juncture. The strikers had already convinced the associated meatpackers that it was time to compromise. But Powderly ordered his men back to work, and the Knights lost control of the situation. One by one the other strikes fizzled out.

Although the mid-18 80s were years of the dinosaur, there were new mammals ready to take their place at its side. Unions crushed by the depression of 1873 slowly returned to life. In 1880 there were already 2,440 local unions. By 1883 they had around 200,000 members. Some of the new or revived unions became adjuncts to the Knights; others stayed aloof. Their revival followed no particular pattern except competition and conflict among themselves. However, as events unfolded, it became clear that the Knights were failing and that their program was partly to blame. Thus, the revived craft unions contracted their scope to expand their theme—a better deal for their own workers.

Powderly refused to associate the Knights with the reviving trade unions’ attempt to call a general strike for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1886. However, the Knights’ new members, who numbered hundreds of thousands, seized upon the eight-hour movement as an issue with which they could confront employers and demonstrate the fierce power they attributed to the Knights. Primarily unskilled, certainly oppressed, they were looking for trouble and they got it. Despite Powderly’s ban, thousands of knights took part in workers’ demonstrations. It was at this crucial juncture that the Haymarket bomb exploded. Despite all their denials, the Knights were tainted by presumed association. Public odium was spread by conviction, contagion, and intimidation.

American Federation of Labor

The union that now played the central role in the movement for labor federation was the International Cigar Makers. It fell into the hands of three remarkable men, Adolph Strasser, Ferdinand Laurrell, and Samuel Gompers. Gompers became president of the New York union, and in 1877 Strasser was elected president of the International union. For the sake of financial stability they adopted initiation fees and high dues. To ensure loyalty they awarded benefit payments for sickness and death. From British unions they took the principle of equalization of funds: a local union that was financially healthy might be required to transfer funds to another that was financially weak.

Gompers was an English immigrant of Dutch-Jewish ancestry who had left London in 1863 at the age of thirteen. He spent his adolescence in the cigarmaking shops of the Lower East Side and absorbed the political discussions he heard among fellow workers. As a young man of twenty-five Gompers had stood among the crowd during the Tompkins Square riot of 1874. Years later in his autobiography (1925) he explained what this formative experience had taught him:

I saw how professions of radicalism and sensationalism concentrated all the forces of society against a labor movement and nullified in advance normal, necessary activity. I saw that leadership in the labor movement could be safely entrusted only to those into whose hearts and minds had been woven the experience of earning their bread by daily labor.

His prime concern was the status of skilled labor. Under his leadership it attained greater stability than ever before. The cost was borne, not by the middle class, but by the unskilled. Gompers and Powderly were rivals, but there was more to their quarrel than a clash of conflicting personalities. In the field of labor relations Powderly’s strategy was political education and his policy law reform. Gompers’s strategy was economic opportunism and his policy law observance.

In 1886 the Knights played into the hands of its enemies. When the New York Cigar Manufacturers’ Association cut wages in January 1886, both the local cigarmakers’ unions protested. The manufacturers ordered a lockout of 10,000 men. One union, Progressive Union No. 1, gave in and settled with the employers. The other, Local 144, felt betrayed. It accused the Knights, who had incorporated the Progressive Union, of raiding, or poaching, its fellow workers. Samuel Gompers was head of Local 144 and persuaded the Cigarmakers’ International to institute a boycott of all other cigars. This agitation was the catalyst in the explosion of accumulated grievances felt by craft unions against the Knights.

They sent representatives to a conference in Philadelphia on May 18, 1886. They ensured that the Knights’ proposals, designed to raise the rights and status of the unskilled, were rejected by every national trade union. In October 1886 the Knights met at Richmond, Virginia, and ordered all members affiliated with the Cigarmakers’ International to resign or forfeit membership in the Noble Order. Craft unions responded to the Knights’ moves by meeting a second time, at Columbus, Ohio, on December 8, 1886. There were forty-two representatives of twenty-five groups. Their vehicle was the new American Federation of Labor (AFL), which now took definitive form.

The AFL acknowledged the discontent provoked by the Knights and determined to avoid its mistakes. It recognized the autonomy of each trade within it. The executive council could not interfere in the internal affairs of member unions. Nevertheless, to prevent dissidents playing on the AFL the trick it had played on the Knights, the executive council reserved the right to resolve jurisdictional disputes. It levied a tax on member unions to create a strike fund and maintain a secretariat. To promote labor legislation in the cities and the states it formed city centrals and state federations.

The contribution of the AFL to the whole labor movement does not hide the fact that national unions were the true basis of its revival. They could exist without the AFL. The AFL could not exist without them. The policy of the AFL was to support unions in winning recognition and securing agreements from employers by collective bargaining, and to strike and strike hard only when these failed. Although it accepted the legislative proposals of the old federation, the AFL resolved to stay out of party politics.

Gompers was elected as the AFL’s first president in 1886, and served in that capacity, with the exception of one year, until his death in 1924. For the first five years he was the only full-time officer. In an eight-by-ten-foot office he sat on an upturned crate at a kitchen table and kept his files in tomato boxes. He wrote innumerable letters, edited the Train Union Advocate, issued union charters, collected funds, and organized conventions. Despite his elitism Gompers never lost the common touch. He loved position and pleasure but had no interest in personal profit. Thus it was his personality rather than his politics that inspired popular esteem. He liked to think he was intuitive. In fact he was pragmatic.

Growth was slow. In 1892 the initial membership of 150,000 had increased only to 250,000. Government, courts, and industry were all hostile. But survival alone was no mean feat in depression. Gompers was able to tell the convention of 1893, “It is noteworthy that while in every previous industrial crisis the trade unions were literally mowed down and swept out of existence, the unions now in existence have manifested, not only the powers of resistance, but of stability and permanency.”

Socialist sects attempted to subvert the AFL in their own interests. They tried to work within it and then establish a competitive socialist union by its side. Gompers and his allies were not taken in. In 1894 socialist delegates submitted a program to the Denver convention. It included the controversial “Plank Ten,” which called for collective ownership of production and distribution. Gompers ensured its defeat by insisting that the convention debate the program point by point. He counted on a whole series of amendments being passed that would damage both spirit and letter. This was exactly what happened. When the diluted program was finally presented in its entirety its original supporters were so disgusted they helped defeat it by 1,173 votes to 735. But they also defeated Gompers in his bid for reelection and elected instead John McBride of the United Mine Workers. Gompers, however, recaptured the presidency the following year.

A significant exception to the trend of affiliation with the AFL was provided by the four conservative railway brotherhoods: the Locomotive Engineers (organized 1863); the Railway Conductors (1868); the Trainmen (1873); and the Firemen (1883). The failure of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 had made them cautious. Moreover, occupational hazards persuaded their members that insurance and benefits were perhaps more important than wages. However, individual unions separate from the brotherhoods did become affiliated with the AFL, among them the Shop Workers, Switchmen, Yardmasters, Signalmen, Telegraphers, and Railway and Steamship Clerks.

Homestead and Pullman

In the 1890s the labor movement was scarred by two great strikes, the Homestead and Pullman. Homestead, a borough of Pennsylvania seven miles east of Pittsburgh, on the left bank of the Monongahela River, had more than 10,000 inhabitants, of whom 3,431 were employed by the Carnegie Steel Company. The plant produced beams, boiler plates, and structural iron. By an agreement of 1889 wages were paid on a sliding scale according to the market price of standard Bessemer steel billets. Only 800 workers were skilled, and they earned, on average, $2.43 for a twelve-hour shift. Unskilled workers were paid 14 cents an hour. The agreement was due to expire on June 30, 1892. About 780 skilled workers at Homestead were firm members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers. They wanted better terms and union recognition. Moreover, they were supported by the rest of the work force.

On the surface, it seemed that they had good expectations. Andrew Carnegie was on record in the Forum in April 1886 as saying that workers had as good a right to combine as manufacturers. In the Forum in August 1886 he went much further and implied that he condoned, or at least understood, strike action and sympathized with strikers who turned violent.

Carnegie was in Scotland. His ruthless lieutenant, Henry Clay Frick, chairman of the board, was in charge. J. H. Bridge, once Carnegie’s ghostwriter, explained in his Inside Story of the Carnegie Steel Company (1903) why Carnegie first encouraged and then destroyed the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. At first, the union was his ally in his campaign for monopoly control of steel. A national trade union served to depress wages throughout the entire industry. Carnegie’s competitors, unable to cut labor costs below his, must then wither in the face of his great might. After he had eliminated his rivals, however, he had no need of the union. Also, it represented a challenge to his monopoly.

The union had three principal objections to the company’s proposals for the new contract. First, it opposed the reduction in the minimum price of the sliding scale from $25 to $23 per ton of steel billets. In effect, workers would lose between 18 and 26 percent of their pay. Second, the union opposed a change in the date of contract from June 30 to December 31. The men knew they could not bargain as effectively in winter as in summer because severe weather precluded strike action. Third, they resented a reduction in tonnage rates at works where new and better machinery had been installed. Throughout the negotiations and the dispute Frick’s attitude was utterly unyielding. The union, led by Hugh O’Donnell and John W. Gates, was equally intractable and called a strike.

On June 30, 1892, Frick ordered a lockout. He intended to import strikebreakers and had three miles of barbed-wire fencing twelve feet high erected around the works. That was not his only precaution. On July 4, 1892, company attorneys Knox and Reed requested a hundred deputies from Sheriff William H. McCleary of Allegheny County to protect the works. But he was unable to assemble a posse. The New York Sun of July 9, 1892, explained that the original posse was no better than Falstaff’s army. Of twenty-three men, two were lame and needed crutches; nineteen presented doctors’ certificates that they were unfit to serve; and two were firebrands dismissed as too dangerous for duty. In fact, citizens of Homestead supported the strike.

Frick had struck a deal with Robert Pinkerton, now head of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, on June 20. He would hire 300 detectives at $5 a day to act as “watchmen.” On July 6 they arrived at Homestead in two barges by a tug up the Monongahela River. The workers had already barricaded themselves inside the plant with steel billets from which they now repulsed the Pinkertons in a battle that lasted from four in the morning to five in the evening. In the Battle of Homestead seven strikers were killed and three Pinkerton men were fatally wounded. Even aboard the barges the detectives were not safe. The strikers fired on them from a small brass cannon and then poured oil onto the Monongahela River, which they then set afire. Deserted by the tug, the Pinkertons had no choice but to surrender. Nothing happened for another six days. However, at Frick’s request, Governor Robert E. Pattison of Pennsylvania summoned 8,000 state militia who marched into Homestead on July 12 and placed the works under martial law.

What shocked public opinion about the Homestead strike more than the violence of the 1870s and 1880s was not the degree of damage and amount of bloodshed. It was the fact that the affair had developed into open warfare between one of the most powerful corporations and one of the strongest unions. Each side had taken the law into its own hands. Typical of press accounts was the report in the Chicago Tribune of July 7 which described “a battle which for bloodthirstiness and boldness was not excelled in actual warfare.”

Congress also realized that such industrial warfare was a challenge to its own authority. Senator John McAuley Palmer of Illinois said on July 7, 1892, that the Pinkerton army was as recognizable as the federal army. “The commander in chief of this army, like the barons of the Middle Ages, has a force to be increased at pleasure for the service of those who would pay him or them.” Palmer’s sympathies were with the strikers. “They were where they had a right to be; they were upon ground they had a right to defend.” Republican elders feared the affair would upset their chances in the election of 1892 and cabled to Carnegie in Scotland, asking him to retrieve the situation.

On July 23 tragedy turned into black farce. A Russian immigrant anarchist, Alexander Berkman, tried to kill Frick in his Pittsburgh office, first with a pistol and then with a dagger. Frick was wounded in the neck, back, and side. In the melee J. G. A. Leishman, company president, was also injured. Berkman was covered in blood when he was arrested. He had intended to cheat the authorities by blowing himself up with two dynamite cartridges hidden in his mouth. But the officers seized him by the throat and he spat the cartridges out.

Alexander Berkman’s friend and accomplice, Emma Goldman, had planned the assassination with him. In the end she was not able to accompany him from New York to Pittsburgh because they could only afford one train fare between them. Instead, she campaigned for anarchy in Union Square, New York. In 1893 she was arrested for urging the poor and needy to help themselves from neighboring stores. Convicted of inciting people to riot, she was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. According to Reynolds Weekly on July 31, 1892, one of the soldiers stationed at Homestead, Private Jams, called out after the attempt on Frick, “Three cheers for the assassin!” His commanding officer, Colonel Streeter, had him hung up by his thumbs for half an hour. When he was cut down, his head was shaved on one side and he was drummed out of camp.

Frick’s injuries were not serious enough to keep him from work on the day he was attacked. But they were fatal to the strike. Hugh O’Don-nell remarked, “The bullet from Berkman’s pistol went straight through the heart of the Homestead strike.” On July 27 the Homestead plant reopened with a thousand new workers under temporary military protection.

On September 22, 1892, a grand jury returned 167 bills against Hugh O’Donnell and other union leaders charging murder, aggravated riot, and conspiracy. No jury would find against company workers. Sylvester Critchlow, whose case was heard first on November 18, was acquitted after an hour’s deliberation. When the company failed to secure O’Don-nell’s conviction both sides agreed not to prosecute one another further.

Carnegie attempted to exculpate himself. He wrote about the episode to British Prime Minister William Gladstone on September 24, 1892, describing it as “the trial of my life.” But although he maintained that the firm was in the right about the contract he implied that Frick was responsible for the catastrophe that ensued because it was he who had brought in strikebreakers. No doubt his regret was genuine enough. But it is by no means certain that Carnegie would have acted differently from Frick. In fact throughout the whole affair Carnegie was writing letters to Frick supporting the company’s attitude.

Frick had meant to break the strike and crush the union. He succeeded. The union collapsed at Homestead. In the face of continued hostility from the Carnegie company it dissolved elsewhere. It would be another forty years before an effective steel union was formed in the United States. On November 20 the Homestead lodge of the steel union voted by 101 to 91 votes to end its prohibition against working for the Carnegie company. Skilled hands were required and new superintendent Charles M. Schwab preferred them to inexperienced scabs.

Political parties cited Homestead to illustrate the virtues of their own arguments. But both sides agreed that if the Homestead employees did not like their wages they should look elsewhere for work and not try to stop others from taking their places. According to new conservative theory business had a perfect right to deny workers the right of free association for collective bargaining in order to save them from themselves. Samuel Gompers expressed pious sympathy with the steel union, which formed an important constituent of the AFL. But he was not an eloquent speaker and his attempts to pass off the affair as some sort of moral victory were mistaken and ill-timed.

The sequence of events in the Pullman strike of 1894 struck further at the workers’ cause. George M. Pullman, manufacturer of railroad cars, founded the town of Pullman, south of Chicago, in 1880. Its 300 acres accommodated houses, shops, and other amenities as well as mills, factories, and a foundry. Although Pullman workers were not trapped in some urban slum, they were living in a ghetto nonetheless. They had no choice but to rent quarters, buy food, water, and gas, and pay for services from the company. And everything was more expensive than elsewhere.

Pullman himself was certainly not penniless. The Pullman Company was capitalized at $36 million in 1894. At the end of fiscal year 1893, dividends amounted to $2.52 million and wages to $7.22 million. However, in the depression the Pullman Company not only discharged more than 3,000 of its 5,800 employees but also cut the wages of those whom it retained while maintaining its old prices for lodging and services. After deductions, most were left with $6 a week, and one had no more than 2 cents. At the same time, the company continued to pay shareholders their regular dividends. Thus, on July 31, 1894, dividends had risen to $2.88 million, although wages had fallen to $4.47 million.

In May 1894 George Pullman received a grievance committee of employees but refused to consider adjustments to either wages or prices. He maintained that there was no relationship between his dual role as landlord and employer. He then fired three of the delegates in violation of a pledge not to do so. It was this action that led to a strike by Pullman local unions on May 11. The company was later obliged to close its plant.

The first meat train leaves the Chicago stockyards under escort of the United States Cavalry on July 10, 1894, and the secondary strike by the American Railway Union in support of the Pullman strikers is broken. President Grover Cleveland intervened in the affair over the protest of Governor John Altgeld of Illinois. The drawing by G. W. Peters after G. A. Coffin was carried by Harper’s Weekly on July 28, 1894. (Library of Congress.)

What transformed the strike from a conventional, if bitter, labor dispute into a conflict on a national scale was the secondary action of the American Railway Union. The American Railway Union had been formed in 1893 by Eugene V. Debs as an industrial union open to all white employees of the railroads. On June 21, 1894, it intervened in the Pullman dispute. Debs secured a resolution ordering his members not to handle Pullman cars if, after five days, the Pullman Company still refused to go to arbitration. Pullman would not give in, and on June 26 the boycott went into effect.

The General Managers’ Association, a group of executives of twenty-four railroads entering Chicago, retaliated on Pullman’s behalf. It ordered railroads to fire workers who took part. But the ARU was ready. Every time someone was fired for refusing to handle a Pullman car the entire train crew would go on strike. Within a month the strike was so widespread that almost every railroad in the Midwest was affected, and the nation’s entire transportation system was seriously disrupted. In the week ending June 30 the ten trunk lines entering Chicago carried 42,892 tons of freight bound for the East. A week later the total tonnage was only 11,600.

One of the most controversial men in labor history, Eugene Debs was an eloquent speaker, a shrewd orator, and an aggressive leader. He was the son of French-Alsatian immigrants who had settled in Terre Haute, Indiana, where his father ran a grocery store. After brief careers as grocery clerk and railway engineer, he became national secretary-treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1878 when he was twenty-five. In 1892 he resigned in order to form the separate American Railway Union. His passionate concern was the dispossessed.

Although he had called the strike, he did not want it. He thought the ARU was too new and too weak to take on the giant railroads. But he believed that if he gave in to Pullman both he and his association would lose all credibility. To retain public confidence Debs insisted on peaceful, passive resistance from his men. This was the last thing the railroads wanted. They looked for trouble to win public opinion to their side. When they could not find it, they fomented it.

Three-quarters of the railroads entering Chicago had been stopped in their tracks. The strikers were steadfast but no longer disciplined. Declining morale and deteriorating behavior among them gave the managers an important strategic advantage. They devised new tactics to exploit the situation. They imported Canadian strikebreakers and ordered them to attach Pullman cars to mail cars. Thus, if strikers detached the Pullman cars they could be accused of interfering with the federal mails. The owners also persuaded their ally, Attorney General Richard Olney, to hire 3,400 special deputies, whom they themselves paid, to keep the trains running.

Olney appointed a railroad lawyer, Edwin Walker, as special counsel to District Attorney T. E. Milchrist in Chicago, and together with federal judges Peter J. Grosscup and C. D. Wood they also devised an injunction to trap Debs. If Debs obeyed the injunction and protested to a court, the strike would be broken until the case was actually heard. If he disobeyed the injunction, he would face arrest and punishment and disruption of the strike by the authorities. Under an injunction, moreover, there was no trial by jury. The judge issued the injunction and fixed punishment on those he deemed to have broken it.

On July 2 U.S. Marshal Arnold read out the injunction against the strike to a crowd at Blue Island, outside Chicago. He and his 125 deputies were hooted down and jostled. This incident served as pretext to invite President Cleveland to send in federal troops, which he did on July 4. It was their arrival that led to widespread violence. The worst riots occurred on July 7, 8, and 9 when crowds attacked an Illinois regiment, which retaliated by firing back at point-blank range. Scores of people were wounded, about thirty fatally. Soon there were 14,000 state and federal troops at large in the city.

Debs was desperate and sought a general strike. But the AFL would not back him. Samuel Gompers was opposed to strikes on principle and, in addition, was jealous of the success enjoyed by Debs. Bereft, Debs offered to call off the strike if the Pullman Company agreed to take no reprisals. But there was no reason why it should concede anything. The courts were ready to take revenge. On July 19 a federal grand jury returned twenty-three indictments against seventy-five people, including Debs, his vice president, George W. Howard; his secretary, Sylvester Keliher; and the union director, L. W. Rogers. Deprived of leadership, denied their rights, and totally demoralized, the remaining strikers abandoned the struggle and returned to work.

Debs and defense lawyer Clarence Darrow tried to have the conspiracy indictments brought to trial. But the government was reluctant. A trial opened on February 9, 1895, before Judge Grosscup. Darrow was obstructed in almost every way, and when a juror fell ill the case was postponed indefinitely. However, the trial for contempt and subsequent appeal, in in re Debs, set a major precedent. Debs justified his actions by telling the court, “It seems to me that if it were not for resistance to degrading conditions, the tendency of our whole civilization would be downward; after a while we would reach the point where there would be no resistance, and slavery would come.” It was no use. The circuit court used the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to support conviction. When it came to the appeal, the Supreme Court sustained conviction on other grounds. Previously, injunctions had been used to protect property from damage by arson, trespass, or sabotage. But when legal strikes or boycotts remained peaceful, it was much harder to prove irreparable damage. The only way was to establish conspiracy and argue that to conspire in restraint of trade was a civil as well as a criminal offense. Thus, in a notorious piece of sophistry the Court equated expectations with property. In in re Lennon in 1897 the Supreme Court went further, giving approval of the “blanket injunction.” It declared that anyone who knew of an injunction was obliged to obey it, whether or not it was specifically directed at him.

By imprisoning Debs for six months in Woodstock, Illinois, the courts turned him into a martyr and made many converts to his cause. After his release he was acclaimed by a throng of 100,000 in Chicago. Journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd could describe him as “the most popular man among the real people today.” The collapse of his cause had convinced Debs that the true rights of labor could not be achieved under capitalism.

The working-class movement could not survive without justice. The crushing defeats of Homestead and Pullman were bitter reminders of the overwhelming power of capitalism. Moreover, any gains industrial workers had made before the depression had been wiped out. Their average annual income was $406. Apart from some highly skilled trades, the eight-hour day was nowhere in sight. Their working week was usually between fifty-four and sixty-three hours. In certain industries—steel and textiles—the hours were even longer.

The only promise for the future rested with the AFL and its traditional trade unions. In 1901 there were 1.05 million members of trade unions of whom 788,000, or 75 percent, belonged to the 87 affiliated unions of the AFL. Gompers, however, opposed industrial unionism, the inclusion of all workers in an industry in the same union regardless of their specific work. Year after year the AFL defeated convention resolutions in favor of industrial unionism, in part because they were proposed by the socialists. However, in the Scranton declaration of 1901 the AFL accepted the amalgamation of unions serving similar crafts. Craft unions had expanded and diversified. Their names suggest as much: the International Association of Marble, Slate and Stone Polishers, Rubbers and Sawyers, Tile and Marble Setters Helpers and Terrazo Helpers was a single union.

American socialists continued their fight against capitalism and, sometimes, one another. Daniel De Leon, an immigrant from Curacao, assumed control of the Socialist Labor party in the 1890s and tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate both the waning Knights and the waxing AFL. He also insisted on strict adherence to his own somewhat inconsistent interpretation of Marx among his followers. This authoritarian attitude was too much for Jewish groups, which broke with the SLP in 1897 and 1898. Their leaders, Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit, eventually joined Eugene Debs in founding the Socialist party of America in 1901. In the presidential election of 1900 Debs had taken 87,814 votes.

The most significant gains of labor at the end of the century were in federal and state legislation. In 1898 Congress passed the Erdman Act. Under section 10 interstate railroads were forbidden to discriminate against union members. Elsewhere there were some striking changes in labor legislation. Even so, new laws defined, rather than solved, particular problems. Labor legislation between 1886 and the end of the century devolved on six issues: industrial arbitration; child labor; women’s labor; safety precautions; responsibility for accidents; and the eight-hour day.

Both New York and Massachusetts provided state boards of arbitration to which either side in a dispute could apply. When both sides accepted the service they were found to abide by its decision. Twenty other states created similar boards before 1900. Child labor was a complex subject involving minimum age, maximum hours, and mode of work. Twenty-six states had passed minimum age laws by 1900. The usual minimum was twelve years. All northern states except Illinois established a maximum day of ten hours and a maximum week of sixty hours in industry for children between twelve and eighteen. Eight states prohibited work at night; most forbade child labor in dangerous industries. In 1874 Massachusetts limited the number of hours women could work in industry. By 1900 so had twelve other states. Four states prohibited night work.

Ten states extended rules governing employer responsibility for industrial accidents. They made employers immediately responsible for accidents caused by defective machinery. Seventeen prohibited industrialists or railroad owners from evading responsibility in workers’ contracts. Although by 1886 seventeen states had limited the working day for men their laws were incomplete and allowed longer hours by contract. However, after 1892 ten states established maximum hours for workers on public contract, including seven northern states who limited railroad labor to fifteen hours of continuous duty.

Most employers feared to meet union demands lest they be applied unequally and they would be placed at a disadvantage with their competitors. American workers had been educated in school to believe in social and political democracy. Industrialists were schooled by experience to believe in economic autocracy. Thus they resisted the very formation of unions. Some would rather have closed their plants than accept unionization. President Francis Meisel of the Kidder Press Company told the industrial commission of 1901, “I do not believe that a manufacturer can afford to be dictated by his labor as to what he shall do, and I shall never give in. I would rather go out of business.”

The most controversial and bitter disputes at the turn of the century, like those of the early 1870s, involved the mines. In 1897 the United Mine Workers tried to restore wages cut as a result of a price war between different mines. Most operators were willing to concede the miners’ point. But when some refused Michael Blatchford, president of the UMW, called out miners throughout the Central Competitive Field. Although his union had only 10,000 members, almost 100,000 miners took part in the strike.

Johnny Mitchell, who became president of the UMW in 1898 when he was twenty-eight, determined to build up a much stronger union with many recent immigrants. By 1900 he was ready to put his organization to the test. Anthracite miners earned on average $250 by piecework each year. By altering the traditional definition of a ton from 2,400 to 4,000 pounds mine operators were cheating their men. Under Mitchell they now demanded a 20 percent increase in wages on the basis of the traditional ton and the end to abuses whereby the companies made their men utterly dependent on them. Although Republican boss Mark Hanna and banker J. Pierpont Morgan tried to persuade owners and miners to compromise, neither side would give in and the impasse was resolved only by the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt.