The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink
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of employment relations and thus has little bearing on present-day concerns. Alternatively, the second disabling reaction derives from the all-too-close parallels between the older period’s central themes and our own. For some, especially on the political Left, the turn-of-the-century conflicts provide little more than an overt demonstration of capitalist class exploitation and determination to crush the system’s challengers that remains very much in place today. For these students, the forms and locales of exploitation may have changed, but the essential outcomes remain the same: the good guys get clobbered and our country is the worse off for it. Simply counter-posing the hard-hearted coldness of Gilded Age villains like capitalists Henry Clay Frick and George F. Baer to the hard-working immigrant steelworkers at Homestead or idealists like railroad leader Eugene Debs, however, risks turning the era into extended melodrama in which it is easy to take sides but hard to see why the details still matter.
To avoid this conceptual pitfall, this chapter offers a a renewed inquest into three major moments of Gilded Age industrial unrest: the Homestead lockout of 1892, the Pullman boycott and strike of 1894, and the anthracite strike of 1902. All three events were suffused with prime aspects of what many have considered immoveable and overwhelming obstacles facing the American labor movement—determinedly anti-union employers; a polyglot, often ethnically divided workforce, and ready resort to public authority (in the form of the militia, public officials, or courts) to curtail the conflict. Yet, my rereading of this decade of confrontation suggests more open-ended possibilities in real time than is assumed in subsequent consideration of the events by historians. Moreover, it is in keeping with the suggestion of recent business and legal scholars that politics as much as “economic and technological constraints” conditioned the American variant of industrial capitalism that rose to twentieth-century dominance. 1 In particular, labor historians can learn much from a renewed emphasis on the role of elites and the ideology of anti-unionism over the course of modern American history. 2
The argument here equally emphasizes the role of contingency as invoked by historian Richard White: in short, “things did not have to be this way.” 3 Unexpected outcomes, to be sure, are not the same as random ones. Social actors have choices, but not free choices: they are constrained by various material (economic), political, as well as cultural limits of their surroundings. In the selective reconstruction that follows, therefore, I hope to identify both larger patterns of development and pivotal actors who in the context of their times might have moved history in a different direction.
Among the latter, consider the following facts. Andrew Carnegie lived to regret his actions in the case of the Homestead Steel strike. American Railway Union leader Eugene V. Debs knew the odds were long in the case of a nationwide boycott of Pullman sleeping cars. George Pullman himself won that battle but lost the war behind his vision of a well-ordered company town. Attorney General Richard T. Olney, who effectively hounded Debs to prison, tried later to do penance for his hard-line position. Ideologically pure railroad owner George F. Baer made a public fool of himself in the anthracite strike of 1902, while both self-seeking union leader John Mitchell and financial plutocrat J. P. Morgan emerged from the same conflict cloaked in civic-mindedness. Turning a biblical injunction into a question, we might well ask, “How are the mighty fallen?” and equally, How do the fallen sometimes do good? 4 The vicissitudes of triumph and tragedy are surely among the most compelling themes of historical narrative; as such it pays us to peer farther into events too long taken for granted.
One basic question, of course, is what set off these strikes? At least in a superficial way, we can quickly answer that question by pointing to a larger pattern in the proximate cause of American strikes. Practically every confrontation of the era has the same immediate trigger: a significant wage cut. What is more, this material sacrifice, regularly imposed in hard times, in every case is interpreted as an attack on worker rights if not more generally on human dignity and freedom. The pattern begins well before our period. The first “turnouts” among the young women textile workers at the Lowell mills in 1834 were responses to 15 percent wage cuts that had also been accompanied by increases in boarding-house rents. The Lynn shoeworkers’ strike, begun on Washington’s birthday in 1860 and the largest such action to that date, was initiated to restore rates that had been slashed three years before. Likewise, the tumultuous mass strikes of 1877 began when Baltimore and Ohio workers rebelled against a wage cut piled on a wage cut. 5
Every downturn, let alone panic and depression, it seems, induced the same dynamic. At Homestead in 1892, union refusal of a reduction in tonnage rates set Andrew Carnegie on a course to lock out the company’s union men. In the same year, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, coal miners walked out over a wage cut and increase in work hours. Famously, in the midst of depression conditions in 1894, George Pullman cut wages for the factory workers who built his sleeping cars an average of 25 percent, without any corresponding reduction in company housing rents. 6 Distress among the anthracite miners boiled over in 1900 around the more indirect attack on workers’ income from the “infamous system of dockage.” 7 In November 1909, some twenty thousand mostly Yiddish-speaking young women sparked an eleven-week strike over cuts in the piece-rate offered by inside contractors; the following year a walkout by a mere sixteen of their counterparts over another piece-rate cut at Chicago’s mammoth Hart, Schaffner, and Marx factory soon coalesced into a strike of 40,000 operatives. 8 Finally, when textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, learned in 1912 that employers had responded to state shorter hours legislation (reducing hours for women and children only from 56 to 54 per week) by eliminating the extra two hours’ pay, they too set off a walkout of more than 20,000 workers in what would subsequently become known as the Bread and Roses strike. 9 Indeed, in the annals of the era, the wave of May Day, 1886, eight-hour strikes stand out as worker initiatives not begun in response to employer wage cuts, though there is a caveat even to this exception: just as in the subsequent Lawrence Strike, many struck employers prompted walkouts by refusing worker demands to receive the same wage (previously figured on a ten-hour schedule) for the shortened workday.
In a boom-bust economy, conflicting imperatives, it seems, set employers and workers bitterly against each other. Employers, in particular, facing declining revenues and desperately clinging to property rights arguments (explored in Chapter 1) as well as their bottom lines, long appeared clueless in adopting any policy other than wage cuts, despite their disruptive social and political after-effects. 10 By the onset of the Great Depression, however, a new pattern seemed to emerge. Negative public reaction and labor upheavals as a result of wage-cutting—the old pattern we have observed from 1860 to 1912 (and which continued through the 1920/21 downturn)—appeared finally to take a behavioral toll on the nation’s business leaders. While hesitating to cut wages, beleaguered depression industries instead cut work hours, and then eliminated jobs altogether. 11
In more recent times, other options continue to prevail over the incendiary wage cuts of the Long Gilded Age. Perhaps it was not until conservative anger at public-sector workers (highlighted by the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981) that the catchphrase “fire their asses” caught up to real-world managerial practices. 12 In any case, selective layoffs and job cuts have regularly replaced the favored Gilded Age remedy to employer economic stress. If not exactly an “out of sight, out of mind” solution, reduction of the workforce tends to render the victims comparatively invisible, even as those spared a pink slip are effectively reminded to think again before upsetting corporate decorum. Even public-sector employers, faced with few options amid the recent Great Recession, have notably tried to avoid naked wage cuts in favor of “furloughs,” or mandatory days off.
Yet, knowing what “triggered’ Gilded Age unrest does little to explain how it developed or ended. For that, we must summon up some of the main characters. Given their power in the era, and the fact that in most labor-management conflicts they usually played with a winning hand, I want to look first, in each case, at labor’s opponents. Then I will circle back in selective reconsideration of the pro-labor forces of the day.
In the figures of Carnegie and Pullman, we have prime specimens of the class that has been popularly memorialized as either “Robber Barons” or “Captains of Industry,” but in either case as prototypes