The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink
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world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” Yet, within a decade, the unmistakable evidence of industrial hierarchy—most evident in the expansion of mines and railroads—belied such optimistic scenarios. Already by 1870, as confirmed by the census enumeration, two-thirds of those engaged in the marketplace were hirelings. 15 Many critics saw the dawning system of industrial capitalism as one of systemic, liberty-denying oppression. Their central argument, repeatedly made by leaders and publicists within the late nineteenth-century labor movement, closely aligned a budding working-class identity with the strident free-labor versus slavery theme of the Civil War. Precisely because of the “immediate reality” of slavery, the economic dependence of wage earners lent “special power” to a sense that wage work was less than free. 16
Perhaps the clearest exposition of the wage-system-as-slavery critique in America came from Boston machinist and eight-hour reformer Ira Steward. How much, he rhetorically asked, was “the anti-slavery idea” worth, “without the power to exercise it”? Given the conditions of industrial employment, there was little “free” about free labor. “The laborer’s commodity,” he elaborated, “perishes every day beyond the possibility of recovery. He must sell today’s labor today, or never.” Only by interrupting the social and political power of the employer (in Steward’s mind via the legislated shorter day) could freedom be restored to the individual laborer. 17
The wage-slavery argument, linking as it did the legacies of yeoman democracy and abolitionist thought, demanded social alternatives. So it was that the mass movements of the late nineteenth century slid easily (as in the case of the Knights of Labor) into talk of the “abolition of the wages system,” or (as in the case of the People’s Party) a demand for “industrial freedom” that required the structural dismantling of a society of “tramps and millionaires.” 18 Sounding a stark contradiction between individual political liberty and industrial employment, Knights leader George E. McNeill proclaimed, “We declare an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican system of government.” 19 In each case these radical reformers looked to a combination of group self-activity (whether through labor unions, farmers’ alliances, and/or producer cooperatives) and ameliorative legislation to create, as the preamble to the Knights’ constitution put it in 1885, a necessary “check … upon unjust accumulation, and the power for evil of aggregated wealth.” 20 Committed to a republican commonwealth in which self-governing citizens would, through the power of the franchise, keep monopoly power and exploitation at bay, the Knights of Labor and their allies disdained individual liberty of contract doctrine as a tool of “wage slavery.” 21
Despite such rhetorical swagger, in practice the nineteenth-century labor movement regularly jockeyed between conciliatory and even individual strategies of advancement within the wage system versus more systemic attacks on the putative source of their oppression. Partly it was a matter of varied and evolving calculations of group interest. For decades many of the most skilled workers, for example, as represented by self-styled “respectable” craft unions, continued to subscribe to the tenets of what others now viewed as free-labor mythology. The railroad brotherhoods were perhaps the quintessential representatives of this perspective. “Sobriety, Benevolence, and Industry” proclaimed the masthead of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. Even in the aftermath of the great railroad riots of 1877 in which he took no part, the young Eugene V. Debs, editor of the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, could still describe the railroad corporation as “the architect of progress” and anticipate a harmonious relationship with local banker and regional railroad owner William Riley McKeen. 22
Soon, economic concentration and deteriorating conditions of work forced railwaymen, via their brotherhoods, to revise their beliefs. 23 The contracts to which the skilled railroaders subscribed were thus but the follow-up stage to the earlier practice among artisans and craft workers of setting their own standards of wages and hours and enforcing such standards unilaterally (not by negotiation or contract with the boss) through the closed shop. As mechanization took command and the autonomous conditions of craft control weakened, skilled workers clung to job control, as historian David Montgomery most assiduously demonstrated, through negotiated trade agreements. 24
Interestingly, it was the appeal to individual character—and in particular the safeguarding of one’s “manliness,” the repository of traditional artisan virtue—that in many cases brought craft workers to the battlements of the era’s Great Upheaval. Reflecting on the trials of the Knights of Labor amid the Gould Strike of 1885, Debs displayed a newly minted radical social critique in an editorial entitled, “Art Thou a Man?,” in which he defended the rights inherent in a worker’s manhood against the power of monopoly. 25 In important respects, the erosion of earlier free-labor idealism seems to have been sparked by male worker fears of dependency, linked at once to economic change and to a gender shift in the marketplace. As Alice Kessler-Harris has elaborated, women’s employment—whether forced or voluntary—posed a cultural problem: “just as men’s free labor was predicated on their capacity to support a family, so women’s was assumed to sustain the family labor of men… . For women’s wage work to threaten the male’s capacity to be free was a problem just as it was a problem if women’s wage work undermined the capacity of either men or women to be effective family members.” 26 At best, therefore, women’s discretionary income might supplement the male breadwinner’s earnings. 27 The control and autonomy that had once clearly separated at least the skilled craftsman from the dependency of slaves, women, and lowly laborers was, for many, now under siege. In such circumstances, resort to the male breadwinner ideal—sometimes in a defensive and politically conservative way—defined the arena of grievance more powerfully than mere economic arguments. It was on such a basis, for example, that craft unions commonly excluded women members and that railway brotherhoods long established separate seniority lists and other mechanisms of exclusion aimed at African American workers. 28
Beyond a sometimes confusing resort to a cross-class political inheritance, workers’ ambivalence about the free-labor marketplace was also conceptual. What was the wage-system, exactly? And, more to the point, what were its most egregious, unacceptable features? The fact is, beneath the arguments of both free-labor market critics like Ira Steward and apologists like Supreme Court Justice Stephen A. Field beckoned a wide, and messier, territory of workaday experience. The issue recalls the French textile trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As historian William Reddy noted more generally about the English and French artisan trades in these years, the “catastrophes” that generally befell them “resembled hardly at all what the effects of a free market would look like… . No market for labor was ever created in either of these countries. In this crucial sense the market system failed to appear.” 29 As a result, two illusions developed within the new nineteenth-century market culture: “that gain was the basic human motive and that unregulated competition brought maximum progress.” This dual set of assumptions was rather quickly accepted as normative by both defenders of advancing industrial capitalism and their opponents. Yet reality on the ground, at least in the French textile industry, did not square with its ideological categorization. Even as the antagonists gravitated across the nineteenth century toward a common embrace of a “market model” of human motivation and behavior, the result, Reddy argues, left both contemporaries and historians with an “extremely over-simplified view” of contemporary material conditions and labor relations as actually experienced. 30
Like the French textile trade, Gilded Age industrial employment was also riddled with “deformations” of market culture—or what we might synonymously label free-labor culture within the competitive wage system. Indeed, across the spectrum of industrial employment, it is hard to find a sector that did not combine a significant amount of coercion, subterfuge, or other extra-economic sanctions with competitive free-labor competition for jobs and wages. Similarly, it was often these very deformations rather than the secular logic of the wage-system itself that most readily drew the ire of American workers.
Some of the most common—and notorious—cases of deformation derived from the