Labor in the Age of Industrialization
Labor in the Age of Industrialization
Labor conflict was never more contentious or violent in the United States than during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when bloody confrontations wracked the railroad, steel, and mining industries. During the early 1880s, there were about 500 strikes a year involving about 150,000 workers. By the 1890, the number had climbed to a thousand a year involving 700,000 workers a year, and by the early 1900s, the number of strikes had climbed to 4,000 annually.
Some 500 times government sent in militias or federal troops to put down labor strikes. While most labor clashes took place in the mines and mills of the East and Midwest, bloody incidents involving private police forces, state militias, and federal troops also took place on the New Orleans and San Francisco waterfronts and in the mining districts of Colorado and Idaho.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, labor struggles were more acute in the United States than in many European countries. Today, in contrast, labor relations in the United States are more cooperative and less conflict-ridden than elsewhere. The story of how the United States forged an enduring and workable system of collective bargaining after more than half a century of bitter struggles is one of the most important themes in modern American history.
American Labor in Comparative Perspective
In 1905, Werner Sombart, a German social democrat who became a Nazi party supporter in the 1930s, asked why the American working class—unlike the workers in every other industrialized country—never produced a genuinely mass-based political party of its own. In Europe, the working class created Labor, Social Democratic, and Socialist parties with massive popular support; in sharp contrast, American workers threw their support to the Democratic and Republican Parties, which were broad-based coalitions that included business, middle-class, and labor interests.
Sombart’s explanation was that the political and economic position of the American working class made it much more conservative than its European counterpart. In contrast to Europe, where the working class had to struggle to win the vote, universal manhood suffrage was the practice in the United States. Further, American workers, Sombart insisted, enjoyed a much higher standard of living than their European counterpart and had a much greater chance to rise into the middle class.
Sombart overestimated the economic well-being of the American working class. While the average income of industrial workers in the United States were indeed higher than in Europe, between 1860 and 1913, working-class wages, adjusted for inflation, rose more slowly than in Britain, France, Germany, or Sweden. In addition, the American economy between the Civil War and World War I was even more subject to boom and bust cycles than the economies of other industrial countries.
During the late nineteenth century, the average American worker was jobless for three or four months a year due to illness, inclement weather, or seasonal unemployment.
In the late nineteenth century, the average income of an urban worker was only about four or five hundred dollars a year, a sum insufficient to support a family. The remainder was made up by wives and especially by older children. Children under the age of 16 contributed about twenty percent of the income. These children worked not because their parents were heartless, but because their earnings were absolutely essential for their family’s well-being.
The Drive for Unionization
American workers experienced the economic transformations of the late nineteenth century in terms of a wrenching loss of status. For free white men, pre-Civil War America, more than any previous society, was a society of independent producers and property holders. Farmers, shopkeepers, and craftsmen generally owned the property they worked. About four-fifths of free adult men owned property on the eve of the Civil War. High rates of physical mobility combined with the availability of western lands to foster a sense that the opportunity to acquire property was available to anyone who had sufficient industry and initiative.
After the Civil War, however, American workers feared that their status was rapidly eroding. The expanding size of factories made relations between labor and management increasingly impersonal. Mechanization allowed many industries to substitute semi-skilled and unskilled laborers for skilled craft workers. A massive influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe saturated labor markets, slowing the growth of working-class incomes.
Echoing earlier debates over slavery, many working men and women feared that the great industrialists were imposing a new form of feudalism in America, which was reducing “freemen” to “wage slaves.” They demanded “a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work” and an eight-hour work day. Native-born workers, fearing competition from low-wage immigrant workers, sometimes agitated for immigration restriction. Many observers feared that the United States was on the brink of a ruinous class war.
At the end of the nineteenth century, American workers intensely debated how they could best defend their interests in the face of powerful national corporations. One of the most contentious questions that late nineteenth century workers debated was whether labor should agitate for higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions, or for more fundamental transformations in the nation’s economy. Some of the earliest labor organizations called for a “cooperative” rather than a corporate economy, built around worker-controlled producer cooperatives.
Another source of controversy was whether unions should try to organize whole industries (what are called industrial unions) or organize particular skilled crafts (craft unions). Unlike unskilled or semi-skilled craft workers who could be easily replaced by immigrant labor, skilled craft workers, the “aristocracy of labor,” had greater power to bargain with employers.
What was at stake in these debates was the very meaning of American democracy in a modern, industrial society. Among the crucial questions was government’s role in labor disputes: Would government, at the local, state, and federal levels, align itself with labor or management?
The Great Railroad Strike
The total miles of railroad track in the United States increased from just twenty-three in 1830 to 35,000 by the end of the Civil War to a peak of 254,000 in 1916. By the eve of World War I, railroads employed one out of every twenty-five American workers. The industry’s growth was accompanied by bitter labor disputes. Many of the nation’s most famous strikes involved the railroads.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the country’s first major rail strike and witnessed the first general strike in the nation’s history. The strikes and the violence it spawned briefly paralyzed the country’s commerce and led governors in ten states to mobilize 60,000 militia members to reopen rail traffic. The strike would be broken within a few weeks, but it helped set the stage for later violence in the 1880s and 1890s, including the Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago in 1886, the Homestead Steel Strike near Pittsburgh in 1892, and the Pullman Strike in 1894.
In 1877, northern railroads, still suffering from the Financial Panic of 1873, began cutting salaries and wages. The cutbacks prompted strikes and violence with lasting consequences. In May the Pennsylvania Railroad, the nation’s largest railroad company, cut wages by ten percent and then, in June, by another ten percent. Other railroads followed suit. On July 13, the Baltimore & Ohio line cut the wages of all employees making more than a dollar a day by ten percent. It also slashed the workweek to just two or three days. Forty disgruntled locomotive firemen walked off the job. By the end of the day, workers blockaded freight trains near Baltimore and in West Virginia, allowing only passenger traffic to get through.
Also in July, the Pennsylvania Railroad announced that it would double the length of all eastbound trains from Pittsburgh with no increase in the size of their crews. Railroad employees responded by seizing control of the rail yard switches, blocking the movement of trains.
Soon, violent strikes broke out in Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Governors in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia called out their state militias. In Baltimore, Charles A. Malloy, a twenty-year-old volunteer in the Maryland National Guard, described the scene: “We met a mob, which blocked the streets. “They came armed with stones and as soon as we came within reach they began to throw at us.” Fully armed and with bayonets fixed, the militia fired, killing ten, including a newsboy and a sixteen-year-old student. The shootings sparked a rampage. Protesters burned a passenger car, sent a locomotive crashing into a side full of freight cars, and cut fire hoses. At the height of the melee, 14,000 rioters took to the streets. Maryland’s governor telegraphed President Rutherford Hayes and asked for troops to protect Baltimore.
“The strike,” an anonymous Baltimore merchant wrote, “is not a revolution of fanatics willing to fight for an idea. It is a revolt of working men against low prices of labor, which have not been accomplished with corresponding low prices of food, clothing and house rent.”
In Pittsburgh, where the local militia sympathized with the rail workers, the governor called in National Guard troops from Philadelphia. The troops fired into a crowd, killing more than twenty civilians, including women and at least three children. A newspaper headline read:”Shot in Cold Blood by the Roughs of Philadelphia. The Lexington of the Labor Conflict at Hand. The Slaughter of Innocents.”
An angry crowd forced the Philadelphia troops to retreat to a roundhouse in the railroad complex, and set engines, buildings, and equipment ablaze. Fires raced through parts of the city, destroying 39 buildings, 104 engines, 46 passenger cars, and over 1,200 freight cars. The Pennsylvania Railroad claimed losses of more than four million dollars in Pittsburgh.
When the National Guard was at last able to evacuate the roundhouse, it was harassed by strikers and rioters. A legislative report said that the National Guard forces “were fired at from second floor windows, from the corners of the streets…they were also fired at from a police station, where eight or ten policemen were in uniform.” Militia and federal troops opened the railroad in Pittsburgh and Reading, Pennsylvannia was occupied by U.S. Army troops.
It appears that some forty people were killed in the violence in Pittsburgh. Across the country more than a hundred died, including eleven in Baltimore and a dozen in Reading, Pennsylvannia By the end of July, most strike activity was over. But labor strikes in the rail yards recurred from 1884 to 1886 and from 1888 to 1889 and again in 1894.
Native-born Americans tended to blame the labor violence on foreign agitators. “It was evident,” said the Annals of the Great Strikes in the United States, published in 1877, “that there were agencies at work outside the workingmen’s strike. The people engaged in these riots were not railroad strikers. The Internationalists had something to do with creating scenes of bloodshed…. The scenes…in the city of Baltimore were not unlike those which characterized the events in the city of Paris during the reign of the Commune in 1870.”
The Molly Maguires
On June 21, 1877, in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvannia, ten Irish immigrants were hanged for terrorism and murder in the region’s coalfields. According to the prosecution, the men were members of a secret organization, the Molly Maguires. Before they were hanged, the condemned men swore their loyalty to the Catholic Church.
Soon, another ten men would be executed. The Chicago Tribune editorialized, history “affords no more striking illustration of the terrible power for evil of a secret, oath-bound organization controlled by murderers and assassins than the awful record of crime committed by the Molly Maguires in the anthracite-coal region of Pennsylvania.” A Philadelphia newspaper expressed thanks at the “deliverance from as awful a despotism of banded murderers as the world has ever seen in any age.”
Violence in the coalfields began during the Civil War and grew in intensity during the 1870s. Altogether, about twenty-four mine foremen and superintendents had been murdered in Pennsylvania’s mining district. In 1873, Pinkerton’s, a private detective agency, reported rumors about the existence of “the ‘Molly Maguires,” a band of roughs joined together for the purpose of instituting revenge against anyone whom they may have taken a dislike.” The Reading Railroad, which controlled mining in the region, hired Pinkerton’s to investigate. For two-and-a-half years, a Pinkerton detective, an Irish Catholic immigrant named James McParland, worked undercover in the coalfields and later testified against the twenty accused men. The trial itself was a mockery of judicial process, with coal company attorneys prosecuting the case in court.
Apparently, a scattering of Irish immigrant coal miners did engage in violence in the coal fields, though a majority of the men executed as assassins were probably innocent of the murder charges. The Mollies were apparently modeled after impoverished Catholic farmers in West Donegal County, Ireland, who disguised themselves wearing women’s clothes who staged nocturnal raids against Protestant landowners. According to one tale, Molly Maguire was a woman who wore pistols strapped to her thighs and led bands of men through the countryside.
Alarm over the Molly Maguires helped mine operators crush the miners’ union, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, eliminating unions from the coal field for many years. Fear of the Mollies also led Catholic bishops to excommunicate any Catholic who remained a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a fraternal order to which some violent Irish miners belonged.
In 1979, Pennsylvania’s governor issued a posthumous pardon to John Kehoe, the last of the accused Mollies to be hanged.
The Origins of American Trade Unionism
It took American labor longer than industrialists to successfully organize on a national basis. By the 1820s, craft workers in the Northeast had organized the first unions to protest the increased use of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the production process. But these were local organizations. It was not until 1834 that the first national organization of wage earners, the National Trades’ Union, was formed. By 1836, the organization claimed 300,000 members, but it rapidly lost membership during the financial panic of 1837.
In 1852, printers’ locals in twelve cities organized the National Typographical Union, which fought for a common wage scale and restrictions on the use of apprentices. It was one of five national unions formed in the 1850s. Another twenty-one national unions were organized in the 1860s. By the early 1870s, about 300,000 workers were organized, making up about nine percent of the industrial labor force. But during the financial depression from 1873 to 1878, membership in labor organizations fell to just 50,000.
The Knights of Labor
During the 1870s and 1880s, American workers began to form national labor unions in order to effectively negotiate with big corporations. The Knights of Labor was one of the most important early labor organizations in the United States. It wanted to organize workers into “one big brotherhood” rather than into separate unions made up of workers who had a common skill or who worked in a particular industry.
The Knights were founded in 1869 as a secret organization of tailors in Philadelphia. At first, the union had a strong Protestant religious orientation. But a decade later, when a Catholic, Terence V. Powderly was elected its head, the Knights became a national organization open to workers of every kind, regardless of their skills, sex, nationality, or race. The only occupations excluded from membership were bankers, gamblers, lawyers, and saloonkeepers.
At its height in 1885, the Knights claimed to have 700,000 members. Despite the Knight’s rejection of strikes as a tactic in labor disputes, the union won big victories against the Union Pacific railroad in 1884 and the Wabash railroad in 1885. The Knights had a wide-ranging platform for social and economic change. The organization campaigned for an eight-hour work day, the abolition of child labor, improved safety in factories, equal pay for men and women, and compensation for on-the-job injury. As an alternative to wage labor, the Knights favored cooperatively run workshops and cooperative stores. The organization held the first Labor Day celebration in 1882.
The Knights declined rapidly after the 1886 Haymarket Square riot in Chicago, in which eleven people were killed by a bomb. The American Federation of Labor, a union of skilled workers, gradually replaced the Knights as the nation’s largest labor organization. Unlike the Knights, which sought to organize workers regardless of craft, rejected the strike as a negotiating tool, and had a broad-based reform agenda, the American Federation of Labor was made up of craft unions and committed to “bread-and-butter” unionism. Its goals were narrower but also more realistic than those of the Knights. It sought to increase workers’ wages, reduce their hours, and improve their working conditions.
Haymarket Square
An explosion in Chicago in 1886 helped to shift the labor movement toward “bread-and-butter” unionism.
On May 1, 1886, thousands of people in Chicago began demonstrations in behalf of an eight-hour workday. The marchers’ slogan was, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”
On May 4, 1886, a deadly confrontation between police and protesters erupted at Chicago’s Haymarket Square. A labor strike was in progress at the McCormick farm equipment works, and police and Pinkerton security guards had shot several workers.
A public demonstration had been called to protest police violence. Eyewitnesses later described a “peaceful gathering of upwards of 1,000 people listening to speeches and singing songs when authorities began to move in and disperse the crowd.” Suddenly a bomb exploded, followed by pandemonium and an exchange of gunfire. Eleven people were killed including seven police officers. More than a hundred were injured.
The Chicago Tribune railed against “the McCormick insurrectionists.” Authorities hurriedly rounded up thirty-one suspects. Eventually, eight men, “all with foreign sounding names” as one newspaper put it, were indicted on charges of conspiracy and murder.
No evidence tied the accused to the explosion of the bomb. Several of the suspects had not attended the rally. But all were convicted and sentenced to death. Four were quickly hanged and a fifth committed suicide in his cell. Then, the Illinois Governor, Richard Ogelsby, who had privately expressed doubts “that any of the men were guilty of the crime,” commuted the remaining men’s death sentences to life in prison.
Illinois’s new governor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three surviving men. A German-born immigrant who had enlisted in the Union army at the age of fifteen, Altgeld declared, “The deed to sentencing the Haymarket men was wrong, a miscarriage of justice. And the truth is that the great multitudes annually arrested are poor, the unfortunate, the young and the neglected. In short, our penal machinery seems to recruit its victims from among those who are fighting an unequal fight in the struggle for existence.”
After granting the pardon, he said to the famous attorney Clarence Darrow: “Let me tell you that from this day, I am a dead man, politically.” There was an immediate outcry. The Washington Post asked rhetorically: “What would one expect from a man like Altgeld, who is, of course, an alien himself?” The Chicago Tribune stated that the governor “does not reason like an American, does not feel like one, and consequently does not behave like one.”
In 1889, the American Federation of Labor delegate to the International Labor Congress in Paris proposed May 1st as international Labor Day. Workers were to march for an eight-hour day, democracy, the right of workers to organize, and to memorialize the eight “Martyrs of Chicago.”
Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor
The labor movement gained strength in the 1850s in such crafts as typographers, molders, and carpenters. Fixed standards of apprenticeship and of wages, hours, and working conditions were drafted. Although such agreements often broke down in periods of depression, a strong nucleus of craft unions had developed by the 1880s so that a central federation emerged. This was the American Federation of Labor.
Samuel Gompers (1850-1924) was the first president of the American Federation of Labor, the first enduring national labor union. He served as president from 1886 until his death in 1924, except for a single year, 1895. Born in London, he immigrated to the United States at the age of thirteen, and worked as a cigar-maker. He became the leader of the cigar-makers’ union, and transformed it into one of the country’s strongest unions.
Gompers believed that labor had the most to gain by organizing skilled craft workers, rather than attempting to organize all workers in an industry. He refused to form an alliance with the Knights of Labor. “Talk of harmony with the Knights of Labor,” he said, “is bosh. They are just as great enemies of trade unions as any employer can be.”
Gompers repudiated socialism and advocated a pragmatic “pure and simple” unionism that emphasized agreements with employees—which would spell out for a stipulated period the wages, hours of work, and the procedures for handling grievances. Gompers proposed that agreements contain clauses stipulating that employers hire only union members (the closed shop) and that any employee should be required to pay union dues. Employers advocated the open shop, which could employ non-union members.
During the 1880s and 1890s, unions sought to secure and retain a foothold in such major industries as railways, steel, mining, and construction. It was in the building trades where the craft principle was most dominant that the American Federation of Labor developed its largest membership. Miners merged their crafts into the United Mine Workers of America, an industrial union that admitted to membership all of those working in and about a mine, whether skilled or unskilled.
In 1892, the AFL’s affiliate in the steel industry, struck in protest against wage cuts. Following the bitter Homestead strike, the steel industry adopted an open shop policy. Craft unions were able to secure collective bargains on railroads, but when some workers tried to form a union of all rail workers, their effort collapsed in the Pullman boycott of 1894.
But some efforts at unionization proved more successful, including efforts in organizing workers in immigrant sweatshops. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers demonstrated that the new immigrants could be effectively organized.
As trade unionism gained ground before World War I, employers in mines and factories established “company unions,” to handle grievances and provide certain welfare benefits. The most notable company union was in the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.
Homestead
In 1986, United States Steel, once the world’s largest steel producer, closed down its mills in Homestead, Pennsylvannia, six miles from Pittsburgh. It was slightly less than a hundred years since the epic clash between labor and management at the plant in 1892 that helped eliminate unions from the steel industry for more than four subsequent decades.
Originally built in 1880 and 1881 by local merchants, the Homestead Works was purchased by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who installed open-hearth furnaces and electricity in order to boost the plant’s efficiency and reduce the need for skilled labor. Carnegie’s steel mills produced armor for battleships, rails for western railroads, and beams, girders, and steel plates for bridges and skyscrapers.
Carnegie’s drive for efficiency also led to an armed confrontation at Homestead. In contract talks in 1892, Henry Clay Frick, the superintendent of the Carnegie Steel Company, proposed to cut workers’ wages, arguing that increased efficiency had inflated salaries. At the time, unskilled mill workers, who were mainly eastern European immigrants, made less than $1.70 for a twelve-hour day. Skilled workers earned between $4 and $7.60 a day. Frick also wanted to eliminate the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union from the plant.
When the negotiations broke down, Frick shut down the mill, installed three-miles of wooden fence topped with barbed wire around the mill, and hired 300 guards supplied by the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The guards were placed aboard two company barges in Pittsburgh for the trip up the Monongahela River to nearby Homestead.
On July 6, the guards were confronted by hundreds of workers and townsfolk. In the gun battle that ensued, seven workers and three Pinkerton guards were killed. Twelve hours after the battle for Homestead began, the guards surrendered.
The union’s apparent victory was short-lived. Within days, 8,500 members of the National Guard took control of the plant. When Frick was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in his Pittsburgh office, public opinion turned against the steel workers’ union. By November, the union had been broken and the mill had reopened as a non-union plant using African American and eastern European workers. Union leaders were blacklisted from the steel industry for life.
One of the strike’s consequences was that the steel mills shifted from an eight hour to a twelve-hour a day, six-day work week, with a twenty-four-hour shift (followed by a day off), every two weeks. It would be some forty-four years before the steel industry would again be unionized.
Pullman
1894 was the second of four years of depression. The pinch was felt even by the Pullman Palace Car Company, which manufactured the sleeping cars used by most of the nation’s railroads. George Pullman, the company’s owner, thought of himself as different from other industrialists. He created a model town, Pullman, Illinois, where many of his workers lived. But when the depressed economy hurt his business, he responded by laying off several thousand of his 5,800 employees and cutting pay twenty-five to fifty percent, while refusing to reduce rents charged employees, who lived in the company town of Pullman, near Chicago. Then he fired three members of a workers’ grievance committee.
On May 11, 1894, ninety percent of his workers went on strike. The strike spread nationwide when the American Railway Union refused to move trains with Pullman cars. Within a month, more than a quarter million other railroad employees had joined the strike.
The government, under President Grover Cleveland, swiftly won a court injunction ordering strikers back to work. When they refused to comply, he dispatched more than 14,000 federal troops and marshals. In Chicago, when soldiers fired into a crowd of 10,000, twenty-five persons were killed, sixty badly injured. Hundreds were jailed, including union leader Eugene Debs, who subsequently founded the Socialist party. Railroad attorney Clarence Darrow switched sides and defended Debs, launching his career as a defender of underdogs. Social Worker Jane Addams led an investigation of the strike.
Samuel Gompers and his fellow craft unionists at the helm of the American Federation of Labor spurned Debs’ plea for a general strike to protest enlistment of the White House and the courts on the side of management.
Labor Organizing
Labor strife was never more prevalent or violent in the U.S. than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the late nineteenth century, many attempts were made to organize workers. But the only effort in this period that endured was Samuel Gompers’s emphasis on “bread-and-butter” unionism intended to raise wages, shorten hours, and improve working conditions: Organizing skilled workers in particular crafts or trades to improve wages and working conditions. Efforts to organize all workers in a one big union or to unionize unskilled workers or to transform the capitalist system repeatedly failed. By the early twentieth century, a compromise between labor and capital had been reached: Unions were limited to industrial firms, not to other areas of the economy. These industrial unions would only unionize skilled workers, not unskilled workers.And unions would only seek improvement in “bread-and-butter” issues and would not interfere in issues involving hiring or the labor process on shop floors.
History Through…
…Holidays: Labor Day
Labor Day, the holiday honoring America’s workingmen and women, is today regarded as a day of rest and recreations signaling the end of summer and the beginning of the school year. Calls for a Labor Day had begun as early as 1869. But it was not until 1882 that the first Labor Day parade was held in New York City, under the sponsorship of the Knights of Labor. Ten thousand men and women marched down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. The holiday was intended to fill the gap between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving and to demonstrate labor’s strength.
The first Labor Day parade was organized by Peter J. McGuire, a New York City carpenter, who founded not only the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, but also the English-speaking branch of the Socialist Labor Party, and by Matthew Maguire, a machinist from Patterson, New Jersey, who later became the first Socialist Labor Party member elected to public office (as an alderman in Patterson, New Jersey).
The parade drew the following negative reaction in a New York newspaper:
A large force of working men of this city and neighborhood indulged in a parade and picnic yesterday, apparently for the purpose of enjoying a holiday, and at the same time making an exhibition of numerical strength.
At the time, there was debate about when a holiday should be held. In 1888, labor leaders from several countries picked May 1st as International Labor Day, to commemorate the Haymarket Massacre, a gathering of 10,000 people that began peacefully on Tuesday May 4th, 1886, at the Haymarket Square in Chicago. By that evening, The Chicago Herald described a scene of “wild carnage” and estimated at least fifty dead or wounded civilians lay in the streets along with at sixty policemen.
In 1894, in the midst of the Pullman strike, Congress established a national Labor Day by unanimous vote. Six days after signing the act into law, Cleveland sent several thousand deputies to Chicago to enforce a court injunction barring workers from interrupting delivery of the mail.