The Long Gilded Age

American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order

Leon Fink

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780812292039
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

From the end of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth, the United States experienced unprecedented structural change. Advances in communication and manufacturing technology brought about a revolution for major industries such as railroads, coal, and steel. The still-growing nation established economic, political, and cultural entanglements with forces overseas. Local strikes in manufacturing, urban transit, and construction placed labor issues front and center in political campaigns, legislative corridors, church pulpits, and newspapers of the era. The Long Gilded Age considers the interlocking roles of politics, labor, and internationalism in the ideologies and institutions that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Presenting a new twist on central themes of American labor and working-class history, Leon Fink examines how the American conceptualization of free labor played out in iconic industrial strikes, and how "freedom" in the workplace became overwhelmingly tilted toward individual property rights at the expense of larger community standards. He investigates the legal and intellectual centers of progressive thought, situating American policy actions within an international context. In particular, he traces the development of American socialism, which appealed to a young generation by virtue of its very un-American roots and influences. The Long Gilded Age offers both a transnational and comparative look at a formative era in American political development, placing this tumultuous period within a worldwide confrontation between the capitalist marketplace and social transformation.

Chapter 1

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The American Ideology

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.

—Abraham Lincoln, 1864

Had Alexis de Tocqueville, miraculously, been able to revisit France and America a scant thirty years after his death in 1859, he might have been tempted to dramatically invert his principal judgments on the two nations. For Tocqueville, self-constituted civic organizations (associations in his vocabulary) figured centrally in distinguishing a buoyant democracy from the twinned specters of suffocating absolutism and excessive individualism. On the one hand, the ubiquity of such agents, commonly labeled the “spirit of volunteerism,” provided for Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835, 1840) the lodestone of America’s social promise. ¹ On the other hand, as he argued in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), an all-powerful, centralized state—reflected in the LeChapelier Law of 1791 banning guilds and other intermediary bodies—snuffed out the lifeblood of liberal democracy in France. “For Tocqueville,” as historian Richard Swedberg summarizes, “the tragedy of the French Revolution was that it inspired freedom but that people had no idea how to go about creating a free society.” ²

And yet, by the late nineteenth century, the French state, while never abandoning its characteristic long reach, had moved markedly away from the suffocating control characteristic of both its absolutist and revolutionary heritage. By the time of the February 1848 Revolution, conservative republicans like Tocqueville were already beginning to positively reappraise worker associations as a possible brace against socialist statism. Over the ensuing decades, a combination of republican and labor/socialist reformers did, in fact, restore an associative dynamic to the body politic. Among the key departures affecting working people were the 1864 law abolishing the crime of “coalition,” the 1884 law legalizing trade unions and associations, an 1892 law facilitating conciliation and arbitration, and the Labor Code of 1910 that officially recognized a legal realm for collective bargaining and trade union action. ³

Still in place today, France’s institutional recognition of Tocqueville’s vaunted intermediary bodies has no parallel in American democracy. Except for business combination through the agency of incorporation, Americans in the industrial era found it more and more difficult under the prevailing laws to “join together” to advance their common economic interest. In particular this was the case for organized workers. Although union membership was generally recognized in principle after Massachusetts Judge Lemuel Shaw’s Commonwealth v. Hunt decision of 1842, in practice such bodies experienced multiple, often crippling, obstacles. By the late nineteenth century, the American national state had yet to adopt the socially interventionist powers of its tricolor counterpart, but neither was it any longer directed by the balance of civic interests that had once impressed Tocqueville. To 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 as the 1860s, a self-consciously free-labor advocate like President Abraham Lincoln could imagine the industrial system as one where a “prudent, penniless beginner in the 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 railwa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The American Ideology
• Chapter 2. Great Strikes Revisited
• Chapter 3. The University and Industrial Reform
• Chapter 4. Labor’s Search for Legitimacy
• Chapter 5. Coming of Age in Internationalist Times
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments