The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink
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plank of the National Labor Reform Party, pairing the demand for abolition of the importation of “a servile race”—that is, immigrant contract labor—with abolition of the “system of contract labor in our prisons.” 38 The latter issue came with longer roots. As early as the “Auburn system” in the 1820s, New York and other states employed convicts in numerous trades both for reasons of economy and therapeutic self-discipline. Fearing direct competition from such enterprise, mechanics gathered in protest as early as the 1830s and forced the New York state legislature to set various limits on the prison trades. 39 Given wartime strains on the state budget, New York again loosened its regulations in the 1860s—a pattern for other cash-poor states that would reach its most notorious expression in the South’s “convict lease” system. Here, a prison population that was becoming overwhelmingly black was systematically rented out to private employers on railroads, mines, and plantations with little public supervision or monitoring of exploding casualty rates. 40
In the North, use of Sing Sing laborers to try to break the iron molders’ union turned the issue into organized labor’s cause célèbre in the immediate post-Civil War years. Not surprisingly, when the labor movement generally revived in the 1880s, curtailing convict labor again turned up near the top of its political agenda. In the original 1878 preamble to its constitution (and continuing across several constitutional revisions) the Knights of Labor declared its intent “to abolish the system of letting out by contract the labor of convicts in our prisons and reformatory institutions.” 41 Anti-convict labor laws spread across the northern industrial belt in the 1880s and 1890s. Long resistant to such pressures, even the southern states formally responded to reform campaigns after the turn of the century. By 1928, Alabama, the last holdout, had legally foresworn convict leasing, even as direct public employment—as in roadside chain gangs—developed in its stead. 42
Unfortunately, the gap between state penal-reform codes and the reality on the ground persisted for decades. Heartrending historical accounts of the brutalities enacted in forced labor camps—a “neo-slavery” applied to over one hundred thousand workers, many simply arrested for vagrancy, from the 1870s until World War II—provide the starkest proof of the limits of statutes left on their own. 43 Green Cottenham, for example, a son of Alabama ex-slaves, was charged and convicted of vagrancy in 1908, then remanded to a Birmingham coal mine under the charge of the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company; there, in the company of “more than a thousand other black men,” he was “chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal.” 44 Brutally and baldly coerced labor thus served in the South as a constant threat to hold over the heads of the poorest of free laborers. Not surprisingly, given the notoriety of the issue at the time, the Knights of Labor identified abolition of convict lease among its fifteen prime “objectives” in 1878. Notably, however, the Knights’ convict labor plank was only one of several demands that honed in on what we might consider ‘distortions’ of the labor market. A call for mechanics’ lien legislation (giving workers a priority over other creditors in employer debt settlements) struck at employers’ asymmetrical power in workplace relationships. “Abolishment” of the “contract system” on public works projects aimed at once for transparency in municipal and state hiring. Finally, dual demands for an end to child labor in workshops, mines, and factories on the one hand and “equal pay for equal work” for both sexes on the other represented further blows for market neutrality—that is, a marketplace that provided an equal playing field for all adult workers. 45
For years after the Knights’ era, it is worth noting that what workers took to be extra-market coercions employed by employers occupied a prime spot in fueling labor rage and protests. Prime examples were the grievances against coal companies for practicing short-weighing or imposing scrip and company store systems or other forms of wage theft on their employees. 46 Similarly, various studies have noted the flashpoint of struggle occasioned by a variety of directly coercive practices ranging from what appeared to be arbitrary layoffs and dismissals to the use of private police forces to control of access to company property to the denial of bathroom breaks on the job. 47 Even as the master and servant laws that compelled a young female textile worker to a twelve-month confinement in the mill may have been breached (at least in the statutes of the free states) by mid-century, the underlying principle of coercion, notes David Montgomery, continually “reappeared in court decisions” and was reinforced as well by “draconic vagrancy laws that made it a crime not to have a job.” 48 All such abuses were grist for the mill of labor reformers, but in exposing them workers themselves were inclined to single out contractual coercion as an illegitimate exception to free labor norms.
But, was not such scrupulous attention to marketplace abuses at odds, at least philosophically, with an out-and-out rejection of the free-labor contract altogether, as sounded in the rhetoric of labor radicals like Ira Steward and George McNeill? In short, even if the workers (by legislation or self-action as in the building of cooperatives) accomplished all fifteen of the Knights of Labor’s official objectives of 1878, or even their 1885 expanded list of twenty-two demands, would they not still be operating, at least primarily, within a wage system of labor? When push came to shove, therefore, abstractions like “wage labor,” “free labor,” and “free contract” paled in significance to the actual pushing and shoving on the ground that determined how such concepts affected real men and women. It is a point that demands concrete illustration.
In her recent revaluation of the conflicts leading up to the Great Southwest Strike of 1886, historian Theresa A. Case presents labor mobilization as an example of robust, grassroots republicanism that for a limited time united an otherwise disparate railroad workforce. Union organizers initially overcame a significant black-white racial division (and determination to preserve their privileged status on the part of white workers) as well as internal hierarchies among both shopmen and the running trades. All the more impressive, then, that resistance to the recession-era wage cuts of Jay Gould could weld the men on a network of southwestern roads (including the Wabash, the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas, and Missouri Pacific lines) into effective fighting units across 1885 and 1886 under the aegis of the Knights of Labor, and particularly the Martin Irons-led District 101. 49
Yet, as Case indicates, the labor forces that did battle against Gould’s railroad empire also seized on threats of the potential employment of Chinese and convict workers to burnish the movement’s free-labor message. The actual presence of these allegedly “unfree” competitors was rather minimal. Still, the Central Pacific Railroad had turned to Chinese laborers in the 1860s, some Texas newspapers had proposed using them as a goad to spur the efficiency of emancipated slaves, and Gould had replaced striking coal miners with Chinese in an 1874 dispute. Amid rising fears, moreover, the wives of railwaymen in Texas had in several instances boycotted Chinese laundries because they competed with white washerwomen. Similarly, while most Texas and Arkansas convicts were overwhelmingly leased to farms and plantations, the railroads also hired a trickle of white prisoners for odd jobs. 50
In the circumstances of spreading wage and job cuts and a manipulative and cunning management from afar, however, the “dread of dependence” was palpable for both the laboring and small merchant class of the region. So it was that the strikers, white and black, initially enjoyed strong support from the local press and elected officials of surrounding communities. In Sedalia, Missouri, center of strike strategy, the workers formed their own guard unit to protect idled railroad property, and in Parsons, Kansas, the local paper found nothing wrong with union men keeping would-be strike-breaking “ ‘tramps’ away from the shops.” 51 In both March and September 1885, Knights of Labor mobilizations brought the Gould railway network to heel: in both cases railroad management sat down with labor representatives, withdrew cuts, and rehired fired union stalwarts for what appeared to be an extended commitment to industrial peace. The same period witnessed a gathering independent labor politics in communities around the railroad region. Altogether, the workers’ actions bespoke a most buoyant expansion of free labor ideals: “these men conceived of “free labor” as at once economic, cultural, and political—freedom meant dignity, stability, a fair return for labor, a producer’s claim on the workplace itself, and the opportunity to provide for families and to be public