The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink
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be sure, Tocqueville himself had early on warned Americans of the inequalities sure to develop within a “manufacturing aristocracy,” but the warning had fallen largely on deaf ears. 4 By 1900, few observers would have doubted which country had more succumbed to extreme individualism. 5
How and why had the “free society” that enjoyed such a head start come up so short so soon? The question begs further inquiry. This chapter examines the issue through the gap between formal political ideals and lived experience, as centered on working people and their characteristic institutional voice, the labor union. With a continuing nod to the European, and especially the French contrast, it seeks to identify, in a cultural as well as legal-institutional sense, the obstacles that working people have encountered in securing and expanding their share of the American promise.
When asked what he thought about Western civilization, Gandhi reportedly quipped, “it would be a good idea.” A late nineteenth-century American trade unionist might have said the same thing about “free labor.” Initially associated with positive images of opportunity, progress, and liberation, the concept had since become identified with arbitrary dismissals, anti-strike injunctions, and a general loss of control at work that for many workers amounted to what they called “wage slavery.” A common-core conviction, it turned out, only awkwardly covered a developing industrial landscape. How to balance the inheritance of the free-labor ideal with the reality of capitalist economic development at the end of the nineteenth century posed a special challenge to the American labor movement.
Workers in Gilded Age America confronted what we might call the free-labor “double paradox.” The first paradox spoke to the ambivalence of the republican heritage. On the one hand, a legacy of freedoms and rights stemming from the Revolutionary era, an economy of relative labor scarcity, and the Civil War’s extirpation of slavery surrounded the nation-state and its history in a positive or at least hopeful hue for most working people. Much earlier than in Europe, both physically coerced entry into labor and criminal sanctions for leaving it were eradicated among the nominally “free” population. 6 The Civil War itself confirmed the free-labor order. Beginning with Lincoln’s rejection of the terms of the Dred Scott case of 1857, a new, national definition of freedom (encapsulated in the Civil War amendments to the Constitution) replaced a patchwork of regional variations, each with its own set of limitations on the basis of age and citizenship status as well as gender and race.
Yet, the very regime that destroyed the South’s slavocracy also enhanced individual rights at the expense of community norms long vouchsafed by resort to common law precedent. Historian William J. Novak thus speaks of the very “invention of American constitutional law” tied to a “legal centralization of state power” that ultimately defined “a wholly new political philosophy” focused on a “radical reconstruction of individual rights.” 7 In particular, the newly-created constitutional protections of “due process,” “equal protection,” and “rights of citizens of the United States” would buttress one aspect of free-labor doctrine—the employer’s “freedom of contract”—while simultaneously threatening organized workers’ collective field of action. The upshot was that nearly every attempt by unions to organize or mobilize workers in the era appealed back to nationalist, “free-labor” principles, while at the same time declaiming against immediate conditions that had grown out of the soil nurtured by those very same principles. As historian Christopher Tomlins suggests, the Civil War toppled one “constellation of un/freedom” only to replace it with a new one. 8
There was a second layer of irony and complexity to the Gilded Age discourse of free labor. The workers who made the claim on the national free-labor heritage included many who were not even American citizens—and many more only recently so. Herbert Gutman first highlighted this point, noting in one of his influential essays how two Scottish American immigrants—railroad detective Allan Pinkerton and Braidwood, Illinois miners leader Daniel M’Lachlan—made different uses of the same political inheritance. As Gutman noted about another immigrant, New Jersey labor editor Joseph P. McDonnell, who had served as Irish secretary of the Marxist First International before emigrating in the early 1870s, “his rhetoric was bathed in working-class republican ideology[,] saturated by it.” 9 On at least two counts, then, we are left to wonder about the hold, and meaning, of free labor ideology in the culture at large.
One colorful, yet not untypical, story illustrates the simultaneously unifying yet divisive nature of free-labor borrowings in the Gilded Age. As Thomas G. Andrews documents in Killing for Coal, the original promise of the West was signaled by the path-breaking railroad engineer and coal owner Williiam J. Palmer, who in the early 1870s identified the mountain regions as a refuge from the “foreign swarms” on the Eastern seaboard, who could be filtered out and prepared “by a gradual process for coming to the inner temple of Americanism out in Colorado, where Republican institutions will be maintained in pristine purity.” By the 1890s, however, the coal miners themselves had tailored Palmer’s message to their own immediate and increasingly desperate situation. Facing wage cuts and the overwhelming power of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company amid a bitter national strike in 1894, some two thousand miners marched “behind American flags and brass bands.” In the same spirit, a state United Mine Workers organizer rebuked operators for “having taken from [the colliers] their best blood and their American privilege of earning an honest livelihood.” The strikers, he insisted, “stood by the Declaration of Independence” and its guarantee of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” At a moment of extreme peril, a workers’ community comprising twenty-nine nationality groups thus found common cause in rights they attributed to the American Revolution. Explained one anonymous orator, “Patriots assembled on the Boston Commons … and dared [the British] to oppress them longer, and I say to you that they were men from every civilized land … and they raised that flag and said ‘under that flag we will be free men or under that flag you may bury our dead bodies.’ That flag, gentlemen, waves still.’ ” When their strike was ultimately defeated by a combination of injunctions and strikebreakers, union leaders proclaimed that “Liberty crushed to earth will rise again.” 10
How did it come to pass that the same discursive system of political and economic “liberty” could at once unite the post-Civil War nation and also bitterly divide it on class lines? Historian Eric Foner offers a convincing explanation. Business, economists, and leading newspapers, he suggests, jumped on an “emergent market definition of economic freedom,” emphasizing the benefits of marketplace logic, the laborer’s “juridical freedom” and the “idea of contract.” 11 Already by the mid-nineteenth century, employment relations, as regulated by the states, were regularly subsumed into the hierarchical discourse of master-and-servant relationships 12 The trend took on enhanced meaning beginning with Stephen J. Field’s famous dissent in the Slaughter-House cases in 1873, which identified the Fourteenth Amendment as a guarantor of individual freedom of contract, calling it a basic “right of free labor.” Infringements on just this “right” soon became the basis for the manifold legal injunctions against strikes and boycotts. As if “contract rights” were not enough, moreover, business-friendly exponents of the “science” of social Darwinism like William Graham Sumner equally helped to explain social inequality and sanction the success of the successful. 13
An enduring, early twentieth-century addition to the employers’ lexicon of free labor arrived with the concept of the “right-to-work.” In one of the first uses of the phrase, muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker took up the cudgels for the estimated 17,000 men who defied union orders and threats to continue work during the 1902 anthracite strike (see Chapter 2). As Baker quoted a nonstriking mining engineer: “I have a right to work when I like, for what I like, and for whom I like.” It was an attitude, quickly surrounded by legal restrictions on picketing, that helped turn back labor’s first great industrial surge, and it was soon re-outfitted as the “American Plan” to safeguard the open shop post-World War I and regularly redeployed thereafter. 14
Workers, as Foner (like Herbert Gutman before him) recognized, equally “spoke the language of free labor.” Yet, it is perhaps more exact to say that Labor spoke multiple dialects of that language. As late