Between the Gold Rush of 1848 and the beginning of the Civil War, thousands of emigrants headed west beyond the Missouri River. This wave of emigrants became a torrent after the Civil War. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered land free, or almost free to homesteaders, 160 acres for about $200. Without title to it, the government effectively gave Indian land to settlers. Indians had lived in Kansas and Oklahoma for generations, and this land represented not only their source of food but their sacred soil. The buffalo, for example, was a symbol of food, shelter, and clothing.
The westward expansion of white emigrants was to continue in the face of Indian opposition and war to the end which really did not end until the final tragedy at Wounded Knee in December, 1890. The Sioux, the Cheyennes, Comanches, Apaches, Arapahoes, and the Kiowas inhabited land in a great arc beginning in Minnesota and ending in Arizona. They were the last obstacle to westward expansion, and they suffered as a result. Broken treaties and life on the reservations were ending a way of life for the proud Indians who had a culture and language going back several hundred years. The wars between the settlers and the Indians were certain to be won by the former; they had superior arms and more manpower. For a detailed account of this period, Dee Brown has written an excellent book, The American West published in 1994 by Scribner's. It contains a galaxy of famous characters: Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Generals Crook and Custer. This book simply ignores the Reconstruction Era, focusing instead on how the West was won.
The Reconstruction Era, by most standards, ended in 1877, while the country was still in a depression that began in 1873. In that year, the banking firm of Jay Cooke announced it could no longer pay its depositors on demand. The firm lost a great deal of money trying to finance the Northern Pacific Railway Company. Other banks panicked and called in loans. With this contraction in credit, business could not borrow enough money to meet payroll and other costs, so they reduced the number of workers. Unemployment spread, and quite a number of banks failed. However, even before this date, forces were at work shaping the outlines of a modern economy dominated by corporate capitalism.
The railroads were the engine of growth and expansion to the West, and their construction using immigrant labor created many great fortunes. However, water transportation on the Mississippi as far as St. Louis was used even before the Civil War. The Erie Canal, which connected the Hudson River with the Great Lakes was opened in 1825. Before their appearance on the scene, cities and towns survived in virtual isolation except for such primitive transportation as the horse-drawn wagon which carried mostly agricultural products over short distances in the new lands of the West.
Gradually, rail connections were built to connect Washington and New York to Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis. In the South, Martinsburg, West Virginia was a transportation hub with lines to Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and New Orleans. Initially, the builders used different gauge track. Finally, a standard gauge was established, and by 1880 most of the trackage in the United States used the standard gauge rails. By 1877, the Union Pacific-Central Pacific complex was the only rail company to reach San Francisco. The Southern Pacific out of San Francisco, reached New Orleans in 1882. The Great Northern out of St. Paul, Minnesota reached Everette, Washington in 1893, and the first railroad that allowed direct transportation from Chicago to San Francisco was completed in 1892 at Promontory Point, Utah. It was built largely by Chinese labor, a fact that led to many pitched battles with other immigrant labor, some of it Irish. Most of the Chinese workers came from California which had been admitted to the Union in 1849.
One of the more gruesome results of opening the West by rail was the slaughter of two million buffalo by roving bands of settlers within a period of five years after 1868. They killed the buffalo for the hides, leaving the carcases to rot on the land of Kansas and territories to the west. This land was traditionally used by Indians for hunting and gathering of food, clothing and shelter; tents were then made of buffalo hide. Finally, the Indians fought back and killed some settlers. General Sheridan immediately ordered five columns of American soldiers to hunt the Indians down and kill them. The Indians fought a losing battle, armed, as they were with only bows and arrows. Later, they managed to buy some guns, but it was too late to save the Indian culture.
In the 1870's and 1880's, cowboys from Texas drove great herds of cattle -- several thousand at a time -- to the rail hubs in Colorado and Nebraska. From these hubs, the cattle were shipped by rail to Chicago for slaughter. This was the beginning of huge fortunes for the meat packing families, the Swifts, Armours and the Cudahys. The cattle barons of Texas grew rich themselves and the cowboys who went out on sprees after being paid were often met at the village limits and told they weren't welcome with their pistols. Wyatt Earp was one of the early marshals to enforce this ban on guns. Evidently, no one had ever pleaded the Second Amendment to the Constitution as giving the cowboys the right to bear arms and shoot up the town population after spending part of their pay in the local saloons.
Between 1877 and 1892, a few men who saw themselves as nation-builders managed to accumulate huge fortunes. Andrew Carnegie (steel), John D. Rockefeller (oil), Charles Pillsbury (flour), Andrew Mellon (banking), Phillip Armour (meatpacking), Gustavus Swift (meatpacking), J. P. Morgan (banking), Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads), Marcus Daly (copper), John Jacob Astor and James Duke (tobacco) were only a few of them. Duke found and used a new cigarette-rolling machine that could turn out 100,000 cigarettes a day. Duke also put together the American Tobacco Company by combining the four largest cigarette companies.These men saw expansion to the West as an economic opportunity requiring a combination of rail transportation using free land, raw materials, cheap labor, new technology. The first transcontinental telegraph line was completed in 1861, and a huge, expanding market of consumers for everything manufactured flourished in the new West.
In the period from 1860 to 1914, the foundation for a consumption-based economy was built, and the United States needed economic historians. These historians keep track of statistics showing economic growth, gross domestic product (GDP), productivity, income and other variables. The Constitution requires a Decennial Census, and economic data from the Census is available for every ten-year period since 1800. This census also shows population figures nationally and by state. Most of these are available in the Statistical Abstract of the United States for each year. The last full year for this data was 1994. Economic historians may also use independent sources to support their analyses, such as the public records of the builders of the Erie Canal which was completed in 1825.
Copper, iron, coal, oil, aluminum (bauxite), silver, and gold were the basic raw materials used in the expanding economy of the nineteenth Century. Trees for lumber and silicon for glass -- computer chips in the twentieth Century -- were all abundant. There was a huge and westward-expanding market for housing. Wheat and corn had to be grown, harvested, and processed for sale. In 1850, Deere & Company and International Harvester, both in Illinois, manufactured and sold farm equipment, and the former is now in 1996, the world's largest manufacturer of farm implements. Toward the end of the nineteenth Century, a new factor, electricity, helped increase production in some industries, so power plants and hydroelectric dams had to be built to generate electricity. Initially, oil was refined to produce kerosene for illumination of the lamps so many people had in their homes. Later, oil was essential for autos. Not all these industrial enterprises grew at the same rate, and the officers of at least one of them would be described as predatory.
Although he died in 1848, Astor had already created one of the first business monopolies, the American Fur Company. At the time of his death in 1848, John Jacob Astor was the wealthiest man in the United States and owned an enormous amount of real estate in New York City. He bequeathed most of his fortune of $20 million to his children. Astor organized the fur trade from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean and from there to Japan and China and then using money from the sale of fur, he bought tea and sold it in the United States at a great profit. One of his descendants, William B. Astor more than doubled the family fortune by building hundreds of stores and housing on the land acquired by his father. Gustavus Myers makes a point in his book, History of the Great American Fortunes, state and local laws were enacted for the benefit of the landlords and merchants. He comments on this fact of business life in discussing the growth of the Astor family fortune, much of it derived from the rental of New York tenements.
Is it not murder, when, compelled by want, people are forced to fester in squalid, germ-filled tenements, where the sunlight never enters and where disease finds a prolific breeding-place? Untold thousands went to their deaths in these unspeakable places. Yet, so far as the Law is concerned, the rents collected by the Astors, as well as by other landlords, were honestly made. The whole institution of Law saw nothing out of the way in these conditions, and very significantly so, because, to repeat over and over again, Law did not represent the ethics or ideals of advanced humanity; it exactly reflected, as a pool reflects the sky, the demands and self-interest of the growing propertied class...
Charles Pillsbury moved to St. Paul in 1867 and invested his modest capital in the milling trade. Using rail transportation, his mill bought wheat in the Dakotas, converted it to flour and sold it processed in the East. An enlightened capitalist, Pillsbury was probably the first owner to introduce a profit sharing plan for his employees.
John D. Rockefeller was a predator. He wanted nothing less than a near-monopoly of oil refining capacity in the United States and got it. He either bought out competitors at bargain prices or drove them out of business by selling his own oil at artificially low prices. The Standard Oil Company was finally dissolved into various companies still selling oil, but free of a charge of unreasonable restraint of trade. Standard Oil Company v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911). Long before the Supreme Court curbed Rockefeller's monopoly, he had taken on and beaten a major adversary, the Pennsylvania Railroad which owned the Empire Transportation Company and its pipelines from oil producing fields to refineries. Rockefeller dictated the terms of surrender. Standard Oil acquired all the pipelines, so it dominated the routes from the wells to the railroads. Rockefeller brought the Pennsylvania Railroad to its knees by arranging for oil to be carried on the New York Central and the Erie Railroad, both allied with Standard Oil. By 1877, the Pennsylvania Railroad was paying Standard Oil 8 cents a barrel for the privilege of carrying Rockefeller's oil. Some historians argue that the Pennsylvania Railroad was willing to settle because of the railroad strike in 1877.
This strike began with wage cuts made by railroad after railroad. Brakemen and personnel working in jobs considered unsafe by management, were paid $1.75 a day for a 12-hour day. In Martinsburg, West Virginia, Baltimore & Ohio workers decided to fight the cut and went out on strike. They uncoupled the engines and ran them into the roundhouse, announcing no more trains would leave until the 10 percent wage cut was rescinded. The crowd that showed up to support the strike was too big for the local police to disperse. Railroad officials asked the governor for help. The governor sent the National Guard. This was unreliable since many of its members were workers, so the governor asked President Rutherford Hayes for help, and the army turned up. In Baltimore, bloody fighting between the soldiers and workers broke out in the streets. The strike spread to Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Railroad. The National Guard turned up in Pittsburgh. Its gunfire killed ten workers.
The crowd erupted in anger. Railroad cars were set on fire.The depot was set on fire, and a burning grain elevator devastated a portion of the city when this fire spread. Most of the National Guard could not move as strikers in other cities held up transportation. Some of their members even mutinied and joined the supporting crowd. More killing of workers occurred in Reading. The strike spread to Chicago where crewmen refused to sail on cargo ships in Lake Michigan. In St. Louis, the Workingmen's Party called for a public meeting in support of the strike, and 5,000 people turned up. At least one newspaper referred to the Workingmen's Party as Communists, a pejorative term not in widespread use then; Socialists would have been more accurate. They wanted to nationalize industry. Finally, the momentum of the strike ended, and the police and militia took over. When the dust settled, 100 people were dead, most of them workers, 1,000 people were in jail, 100,000 people had gone on strike and more than half the freight on 75,000 miles of track had stopped moving. Working people had learned they did not yet have the power to defeat a combination of private capital and public power.
Industrial expansion had its human costs. Workers were not paid enough to support their families, and this led to resistance. One of the imports from Europe, Great Britain's common law, was to produce unfortunate consequences in the United States. That common law made it a criminal conspiracy for one worker to join with another to ask for higher wages. It was almost impossible to organize labor unions without running afoul of this legal principle and its consequences, usually anti-strike injunctions, violence, and, for some, such as Eugene Debs, jail.
The Pullman strike of 1877 was a terrible setback for labor, but it did produce one benefit nine years later, the "Memorial on the Knights of Labor" probably the most influential document ever written on the relationship of the Catholic Church in the United States to the labor movement. It was written in Rome and signed by the leaders of the church. It was addressed to Giovanni Cardinal Simeoni. He was Prefect of the Congregational de Propaganda Fide, the department of eccleasiastical government that had jurisdiction over the Church in missionary lands, the category in which the United States was placed by the Holy See in 1887. However, it was not until 1886, with the Haymarket Massacre, and scattered railway strikes that this benefit surfaced. All the members of the Knights of Labor were working men and some women, and the vast majority of them were Catholic. Many of them or their parents had been immigrants from Germany, Italy, Ireland or Great Britain.
Many Americans blamed the Knights of Labor for all the violence and turmoil of these strikes and the violence that inevitably occurred when either the police, the militia, or the then equivalent of the National Guard failed to quell the violence without killing strikers. In any case, the Catholic Church intervened in a memorial signed by James Cardinal Gibbons in Baltimore even though the text was written in Rome.
Although Cardinal Gibbons deplored the use of violence in any form in labor's attempt to gain recognition, he and his colleagues of the Church were convinced that the workers had been the victims of grave abuses by their employers. Beyond the goal of supporting the Knights of Labor -- this organization had been condemned in Canada three years earlier by the Holy See -- they were determined to align the Church in America, not on the side of the enemies of labor when the overwhelming majority of the Church's members were working men and their families. Furthermore, these prelates were determined that the American people would not see the image of the Church as one upholding the rich and powerful. Accordingly, the Holy See declined to condemn the Knights of Labor. The text of the memorial appears in The Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor published in 1949 by the Catholic University Press. In 1887, it was read from the pulpit in most Catholic Churches of the United States and received national attention in the country's newspapers. The power of the Knights of Labor declined and shifted to the American Federation of Labor with so many of its early members drawn from Catholic ranks.
During the last forty-five years of the Nineteenth Century, workers continued to organize, but with mixed results. The law itself represented the principal obstacle to progress toward organizing unions. The courts uniformly reasoned that a worker and his or her industrial employer had equal bargaining power at the time an employment contract was signed. Moreover, a worker injured on the job could not sue for injuries incurred on the job. The courts uniformly held the worker merely by signing a contract of employment assumed all the risks of injury in plants that were not subject to any safety standards. In his books, The Transformation of American Law: 1780-1860 and The Transformation of American Law: 1870-1960 The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy, both published by the Oxford University Press, Horwitz makes this point: "By the middle of the 19th Century, the legal system had been reshaped to the advantage of men of commerce and industry at the expense of farmers, workers, consumers, and other less powerful groups within the society....it actively promoted a legal redistribution of wealth against the weakest groups in the society."
It was all right for women to go on strike in the textile mills of Massachusetts, but their children had to have food to avoid starvation, a condition no industrial manager had any interest in hearing about. And there was no strike fund to pay strikers for the necessities of life during a strike. Until it was ruled illegal in the twentieth Century, many workers were required to sign so-called yellow dog contracts. By their terms, a worker had to agree not to join a union during the period of his or her employment. Most, if not all industries were bitterly opposed to unions attempts to organize. In 1875, Irish members of a society called the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, went out on strike against the owners of anthracite coal mines. They were accused of crimes on the basis of testimony by a detective planted secretly amongst them. These Molly Maguires 1 were arrested, tried, and convicted. They were executed for the crime of striking against an inhuman reduction in wages. The opposition to unions took many other forms. In the 1870s, employers brought in immigrants newly arrived in the United States. They were often hired to break strikes or even replace striking workers. In one incident near Pittsburgh, three Italians were hired to replace coal miners. The Italians were killed, and a jury acquitted the miners. Black workers were not allowed to join white-organized unions, and hostility established the rules of coexistence between groups that had a common objective. In urban areas of the major cities, the working poor and their families lived in tenements with no running water, and raw sewage often flooded the streets.
By contrast, a significant number of men established fortunes in the late nineteenth Century. Often, the fortunes might double for the benefit of the next generation, and there was no estate tax. For the most part these fortunes were built using a combination of business ingenuity, utter ruthlessness, guile, and bribery. Before the Civil War, for example, J. P. Morgan bought some rifles at bargain basement prices and sold them to the Army at a huge profit. However, the rifles were defective in that they would injure any user. There was a Congressional investigation, and Morgan was exonerated. Thomas Edison bribed legislators in New Jersey in order to insure legislation favorable to the Edison business affairs. Rockefeller was determined to vertically integrate the oil business, and he succeeded by conduct that would not survive the light of day in the twentieth Century. Utterly ruthless, he drove out all competition that even remotely threatened his oil empire. Most of these men knew each other and worked well together.
Andrew Carnegie, for example, worked with J.P. Morgan to establish United States Steel Corporation, but at a huge profit to himself. Morgan was paid a commission of $150 million for his negligible role in creating the combination. He sold stock and bonds in the new corporation at a price far greater than the value of the combination. Congress played its part in this industrial drama. It imposed tariffs on imports of steel so high there was no foreign competition.
Finally, combinations became so large they were monopolies, and Congress acted to harness these economic giants. It enacted the Sherman Act in 1890. Section 1 of the Act made a contract or combination in restraint of trade illegal. Essentially, Congress saw Section 1 as a way of halting widespread price fixing. Section 2 of the Sherman Act made it illegal to monopolize, attempt to monopolize or conspire to monopolize trade or commerce. Five years later, the Sherman Act was successfully challenged. United States v. E.C. Knight, 156 U.S. 1 (1895). In 1892, the American Sugar Refining Company, the corporate successor to the Sugar Trust, acquired all the stock of its leading competitors, thereby creating a combination in restraint of trade and probably a monopoly of the market for sugar. Using this monopoly, the combination could fix prices on a national scale. The Supreme Court did not agree. Chief Justice Melville Fuller wrote for the court with Justice Harlan dissenting. The court held that Congress exceeded the power granted to it by the Constitution under the Commerce Clause. By the end of the nineteenth Century, American Telephone & Telegraph Company had established a monopoly of interstate commerce in communication by phone or telegraph. This monopoly was to last until 1982, when the United States District Court forced AT&T to divest itself of regional Bell services and create independent regional companies. Pacific Telesis. NYNEX, Ameritech Bell Atlantic, and three others were spun off the parent company, AT&T.
By 1896, westward expansion had pretty much ended except for Hawaii and Alaska. Alaska had been acquired by purchase from Russia in 1867 for $7 million in gold. At the time, William Seward was Secretary of State in the Grant Administration. (The Alaska Purchase was known by skeptical observers as "Seward's Folly.") Both Hawaii and Alaska were territories and did not become states until the 1950s. The end of the nineteenth Century saw the United States acquire more land in the War of 1896, the Phillippines, Wake Island and Guam in the Pacific Ocean, and Puerto Rico in the Atlantic Ocean. The Filipinos had no interest in becoming an American appendage, Emilio Aguinaldo was a leader of the insurrectos challenging the transfer of the Phillippines from Spain to the United States. It took three years of fierce fighting to crush this rebellion, and the insurgents suffered enormous casualties from war and disease.
In the United States, the Anti-Imperialist League carried on a long campaign to educate the Americans on the evils of imperialism. The membership was composed of industrialists and scholars. Andrew Carnegie and William James were examples of the League's appeal to a cross-section of the public expressing moral outrage at this militaristic example of Manifest Destiny. The League also published letters written by servicemen in the Phillippines. From these letters, one gets the distinct impression that forces of the United States fired the first shots on orders of their superiors approved in Washington. The letters also showed an intense racism which represented of American sentiment at the time. According to various news sources, on average in every week from 1889 to 1903 a dozen black Americans were lynched, burned or mutilated, all without benefit of trial by jury or otherwise. To soldiers serving in the Phillippines, the natives could easily be identified as black -- the fact that they were brown ,didn't matter. They might be seen as Indians and viewed as disposable. One soldier wrote: "Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill 'niggers'....This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces."
The Supreme Court was busy in 1896, two years before acquisition of the Phillippines by war. One of the most far-reaching of the court's decisions was Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). In this case, the court upheld the constitutional validity of a Louisiana statute that required railroads to provide "separate but equal accommodations for the white and colored races." Writing for the court, Justice Henry Brown rejected Plessy's reliance on the 13th Amendment, arguing it applied only to action to restore slavery. He likewise held that the Louisiana statute did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court sanctioned racial discrimination in the South by requiring all facilities to be both separate but equal.
With the passage of very little time, the states of the Old Confederacy enacted laws restricting the use by black Americans of everything from the cradle to the grave: hospitals, theaters, hotels, restaurants, housing, drinking fountains, public parks and swimming pools, libraries and cemeteries. These separate but never equal facilities were integrated only after years of litigation representing the bitter opposition of the South -- and often the North -- to desegregation. A good example took place in the nation's public schools. In fact, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) expressly overruled Plessy v. Ferguson. This 1954 case still stands as a landmark in the search for equal education.Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a unanimous court, saying that separate but equal education was inherently unequal under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
A few years before the turn of the century, the United States had survived its own excesses, and class warfare surfaced again. Another financial panic occupied center stage in the 1890s, and the life of the urban poor deteriorated. Writers saw this class anger on the part of those dealing with the realities of ordinary life: the 12-hour day, unsafe, even dangerous conditions in the factories of America, the exploitation of immigrant workers, corporate resistance to labor unions, corruption in the cities, child labor, wages below the poverty level, and the continuing concentration of wealth in fewer hands. Theodore Dreiser was one of the writers who denounced the Catholic Church for its emphasis on materialism. The Church and Wealth in America was published in 1931, and those interested may download Chapter 14 of this book from the Internet. Dreiser was equally unsparing in his criticism of all religion and had no interest in missionaries. Dreiser was an eloquent spokesman for his beliefs which included support for the urban poor and black Americans. "Ministers," he wrote, "must be adherents of [a certain] faith and talk about whatever 'revealed' nonsense is ordained by said faith. And, should they talk otherwise, is not the corporation-financed American world certain to blacklist, denounce, and pursue them?" Sinclair Lewis was another social critic during the 1920s and 30s. His Babbitt was an example. George Babbitt was the quintessential small town businessman who tried life as a salesman, but finally returned to Zenith, Ohio, not because he longed to, but because it was all he could do. Lewis wrote prolifically, but he should be remembered for Elmer Gantry which showed that a minister can subvert religion, and Kingsblood Royal (1947) which showed how American society mistreated its black citizens. Upton Sinclair is frequently mistaken for Sinclair Lewis, probably because both were social critics. Upton Sinclair picketed the office of John D. Rockefeller to protest Rockefeller's sanctioning of the massacre of the Ludlow miners in 1913. Since Sinclair was the world-famous author of The Jungle, so he managed to hold the attention of the press. Rockefeller ended up making a public relations tour of the Ludlow site in Colorado to counter the adverse publicity. The owners of coal mines never overlooked an opportunity to bring about violence in their efforts to defeat unions; miner-inspired violence played well in the press. The Ludlow Masacre in Colorado at the Coloardo Fuel and Iron Company, a coal mine complex owned by Rockefeller interests, was an example. Sinclair turned the Ludlow violence into King Coal in 1917. Neither Sinclair, Lewis or Dreiser publicly supported admitting women into unions, though as a Socialist, Sinclair would be expected to do so.
Resentment and anger surfaced directed against an economic system that was not functioning for working women in their lives of poverty and unsafe working conditions. On March 25, 1912 a fire swept the top three floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City. Ladders of the Fire Department could reach only to the seventh floor, so workers burned to death or jumped out windows to the streets and died. Exit doors were locked, so the employer could keep track of his employees. When the dust of this dreadful fire settled, about 146 workers had died. Most of them were women who were not protected by any union; the American Federation of Labor (AFL) refused to admit either blacks or women as members. In 1913, the women's movement was picking up political momentum; women wanted to vote. Some 5,000 women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, while an estimated 500,000 spectators watched . Initially, some of those in the forefront of the suffragette movement were Socialists, like Emma Goldman. The Socialists had their own magazine, Socialist Women. It enlisted women in the cause so that by 1913, some 15 percent of the party's membership were women. Margaret Sanger, one of the pioneers in advocating birth control was also involved with the suffragettes. Women got the right to vote in 1920 with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. However, it was not until 1937 that the Supreme Court upheld a minimum wage law for women. West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937).
Because coal was essential to fuel the nation's plants, its workers were basically in the frontline of those organizations trying to create unions against the violent opposition of corporate owners to any union. The United Mineworkers of America was founded in Columbus, Ohio in 1890, according to its Home Page on the Internet. It came into existence via a merger of the Knights of Labor Trade Assembly No. 15 with the National Progressive Union of Miners and Mine Laborers. The constitution adopted by the delegates to the first UMWA convention barred discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin. The UMWA's founding fathers clearly recognized the destructive power of discrimination at a time when racism and ethnic discrimination were accepted facts in some parts of American culture. The following text is from the UMWA's Home Page description of the Latimer Massacre in 1897.
"The anthracite miners of northeastern Pennsylvania were early members of the UMWA. In 1897, anthracite miners were faced with low wages, poor working conditions, and sporadic work. The miners struck to improve these conditions, but poor coal market conditions led coal operators to harden their opposition to the miners' demands. The companies decided on a show of force by their own company police and by the cooperative sheriff of Luzerne County, James Martin. On Labor Day, thousands of non-union miners who were UMWA supporters marched peacefully in the anthracite mining towns. In the following days, more marches occurred. Anxious to avoid violence, the UMWA leaders urged marchers not to carry even walking sticks, though American flags abounded. On September 10, the strikers masrched to Latimer and were stopped by a force led by Sheriff Martin. The unexpected halt led to confusion and jostling, and shots suddenly rang out. Nineteen of the miners were killed and perhaps fifty more were wounded, in what has become known as the Latimer Massacre. Although the violence was committed by the so-called forces of law and was needless -- the sheriff had dispersed larger, rowdier crowds alone in previous confrontations -- no one was convicted for murders at Latimer. The primary result of the massacre was rapid growth in unionism in the anthracite region. During the next four months approximately 15,000 new names were added to the UMWA rolls."
The Latimer Massacre was not the first such labor violence suppressed by the militias or other forces directed by the government, either state or national. Nor was it the last. In fact, labor did not get the right to form a union that might engage in collective bargaining until 1936, when Congress passed the Labor Management Relations Act. During the period between 1897 and 1935, labor and management clashed often and violently.
In 1907, there was a financial panic and crisis. Industrial management had not yet figured out how to control costs. Henry Ford was manufacturing cars and paying workers the unheard of wage of $5 an hour. He could pay this princely sum, because he had created the assembly line where his Model T Fords could be assembled as they moved down a line. Workers added components such as doors, steering wheels and other essential parts as the chassis were moving along the assembly line. Charlie Chaplin's film, Modern Times, was a remarkable satire of this technological development known as mass production. Thirty years later, the stress of mass production under less than human conditions led to bloody strikes in Detroit and Flint, Michigan. Walter Reuther and his brother Victor were the leaders of these strikes that finally allowed them to organize the United Automobile Workers (UAW), a union active today in auto and farm implement companies in 1996.
The Panama Canal had been under construction since 1907 and finally opened on August 14, 1914, the year that war broke out in Europe. Today, the so-called Big Ditch, carries daily commercial cargo in about thirty ships. Even with a two-ocean Navy, military ships such as large carriers may still use the canal. Oil tankers represent about 23 percent of all canal traffic. President Jimmy Carter negotiated a treaty with Panama that required the United States to cede the canal to that country by 1999.
Although the American Federation of Labor was founded in 1881, it consistently refused to admit women or black Americans. Samuel Gompers, then president of the AFL, said he did not want to interfere in the internal affairs of the South. W.E. B DuBois, a distinguished black writer and, according to some, a Socialist wrote in 1913: "The net result of all this [discrimination] has been to convince the American Negro that his greatest enemy is not the employer who robs him, but his fellow white workingman." See his book, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, it reprinted in 1991. According to Howard Zinn, the "well-paid leaders of the AFL were protected from criticism by tightly controlled meetings and 'goon' squads -- hired toughs originally used against strikebreakers but after a while used to intimidate and beat up opponents inside the union."
Thus, in 1905 a large group of socialists, anarchists and radical trade unionists met in Chicago to form the International Workers of the World (IWW), also known as Wobblies. Bill Hayward was the leader, and Eugene Debs, an avowed Socialist, shared roles with Mother Jones, an organizer for the United Mine Workers of America. Their official pamphlets were inspired by the Lenin-Marx perspective that addressed class warfare. They claimed to be peaceful, but at a strike against U.S. Steel Corporation in 1909, shots were exchanged by the Wobblies and the Pennsylvania State Police.
Throughout the long period it took for labor to organize effectively, opposition continued from corporate America, state and national governments. They were fearful of unions, but for different reasons. Corporations saw the threat to profit, but government wanted to muzzle unions in violation of the First Amendment. In many cities around the country, the City Council or its equivalent enacted ordinances forbidding union organizers to address the public. Many Wobblies went to jail rather than surrender a constitutional right to free speech, even though no court had ruled that speech directed to recruiting union members was protected. However, the court finally spoke out. Hague v. Congress of Industrial Organizations, 307 U.S. 496 (1939). This case involved the constitutionality of a Jersey City, New Jersey municipal ordinance requiring permits from the Director of Public Safety for the conduct of public meetings and for the distribution of printed material in streets, parks and other public places. Mayor Frank "I am the Law" Hague was using the ordinance particularly against labor unions. With support from the American Civil Liberties Union, the court agreed that an injunction was proper. It enjoined Hague's systematic denials of permits to address a public meeting.
That case, however, was not decided until twenty-six years after the launching of the IWW, or Wobblies. At the time of the Ludlow Massacre, there was political turmoil. Only three years earlier, the National Association for Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1910, prompted by a race riot in Springfield, Illinois. Woodrow Wilson, a racist, had been elected president in 1912, and women continued to agitate for the right to vote. Neither he nor his predecessors as president, Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt and William Howard Taft so much as lifted a hand to halt the lynchings of black Americans. These lynchings occurred at least twice a week or more in the South. Wilson himself had been president of Princeton, the only major northern university that refused to admit black Americans. Wilson used his power to segregate the federal government. He also appointed southern whites to offices traditionally reserved for blacks, and he vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The one occasion on which Wilson met with black American leaders ended in a fiasco as the president virtually threw the visitors out of his office. By any conservative definition, Wilson was a white supremacist. Wilson maintained a discreet silence about white terrorism in the South, and he provided what passed for scholarly research in the filming of The Birth of a Nation, possibly the worst ever example of historical revision by Hollywood. But this perversion of history was not released until 1915, a year after the Ludlow Massacre.
On April 20, 1914 twenty men, women and children were slaughtered by a combination of Colorado militia, coal company guards, and thugs hired as private detectives and strikebreakers. A few days earlier, miners at the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company had gone out on strike. The miners and their families were immediately evicted from the company-owned houses and set up a tent city on public property. The Baldwin Felts Detective Agency had been hired to suppress the strike. This agency brought with it an armored car mounted with a machine gun. The suppression was well-planned. Kerosene had been poured over the tents to set them ablaze at the right time. The miners had dug foxholes in the tents, so women and children might avoid the random use of guns in the hands of thugs. On the day of the massacre -- April 20 -- miners were celebrating the Greek Easter. At 10 A.M., the militia ringing the tent city opened fire on orders of Lt. Karl E. Lindenfelter. Women and children who died in this slaughter, either from bullets or fire set to burn the tents, were found huddled at the bottoms of their tents. Not one man who committed cold-blooded murder was ever prosecuted, but many miners and their leaders were arrested and blackballed from the coal industry. These details came from the Home Page of the UMWA via the Internet.
The Internet also described the gunfight at Matewan, a village in West Virginia.
"In the spring of early 1920, unorganized coal miners in Mingo, County began seeking to join the UMWA. The coal operators became alarmned by the organizing activity and locked out the miners. On May 12, 1920, twelve men were killed at Matewan, West Virginia in a gun fight in which the local police and the people of Matewan faced a group of hoodlums hired by the infamous Baldwin Felts Detective Agency at the behest of the coal operators to unlawfully evict miners from the homes. In the Matewan battle, Albert Felts wearing a badge as a 'deputy sheriff' of Harlan County, Kentucky fired the first shot but was killed by Matewan Chief of Police Sid Hatfield. Hatfield had warned the thugs that they had no legal warrants to evict the citizens of Matewan and that he would not permit evictions without proper legal procedures. Felts then forcibly attempted to arrest the Chief of Police. Felts had been one of the chief gunmen used by the coal operators in the Ludlow, Colorado Massacre in 1914, in which twenty persons were killed, including twelve women and children who were burned alive in their tents. Sid Hatfield, a hero to West Virginia miners, was himself killed in August, 1921 in Welch, West Virginia by C. E. Lively, a Baldwin Felts gunman. Hatfield's murder was in all likelihood a setup. He was arrested on July 28 on an allegation that he had shot up the town of Mohawk more than a year earlier. He was taken from his home in Matewan to McDowell County, West Virginia, a stronghold of anti-UMWA coal operators. As he entered the court house with Ed Chambers, who had been called as a witness, both were shot down in front of their wives by Lively and two other gunmen. No charges were ever brought against Lively or the other murderers."
Violent strikes were to continue into the 1930s, and no real labor-management peace would occur until the National Labor Relations Act was enacted by Congress in 1936. During the entire period from about 1869 to 1920, women struggled to get the right to vote and even be admitted to graduate schools. It was in 1869 that Susan B. Anthony and a number of other women formed the National Women's Suffrage Association. For the most part, women saw their universal suffrage demands moved in parallel with those demands of abolitionists in the days before the Civil War. In 1873, the association launched a test case in which the Supreme Court held that Myra Bradwell could not be admitted to the practice of law, because she was a women. Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 (1873). A separate concurring opinion of Justice Bradley absolutely infuriated women. Bradley observed "a wide difference in the respective sphere and destinies of women and men." He continued, saying that "the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life....the paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the Law of the Creator."
In the early years of the twentieth century, there was a spreading concern about the health and safety of women in the workplace. Activists allied with the suffragettes pressed for state laws to upgrade the status of women who were rapidly entering the workplace. In 1908, the Supreme Court decided that a 10-hour day for women was enough and beyond that, working was dangerous to their health. Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908). Louis D. Brandeis, later to become a justice of the Supreme Court, submitted the brief in this case; it had 110 pages of sociological data taken from European studies showing the negative effect on women of long hours of work on women's reproductive health. Then, a state court had held that a minimum wage law for women was constitutional, and the Supreme Court voted 4 to 4 on this case, Brandeis abstaining, thus upholding the constitutionality of the Oregon law. Stettler v. O'Hara, 243 U.S. 629 (1917). Finally, Congress approved and enough states ratified the 19th Amendment in 1920. It read in part: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Susan B. Anthony had written the very same language in a proposed amendment in 1878. Nevertheless, women's rights were set back by decisions of the Supreme Court. However, Congress felt that social changes following World War I required women to participate in the political process by voting.
Before entering World War I in 1917, it seems appropriate to mention a film that so revised and perverted history that it deserves comment. The power even then -- 1914 -- of Hollywood's foray into historical filming was a product so dreadfullly racist it stands as a monument to falsity. The film, The Birth of a Nation, was based on a novel by Thomas Dixon. Jr., The Clansmen. Produced by D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation was seen by some two hundred million people between 1915 and 1946 in the United States and overseas, where it scored particularly impressive triumphs in Germany and South Africa, according the Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies. One of its editors, Leon F. Litwack described The Birth of a Nation:
From the very outset, this film mesmerized and misled Americans, revealing the extraordinary power of the cinema to "teach" history and to reflect and shape popular attitudes and stereotypes. Earlier public entertainment -- such as minstrel shows, "coon" songs, and vaudeville -- depicted blacks as clowns and buffoons, essentially passive objects.The Birth of a Nation, however, introduced still another dimension: The grinning and obsequious demeanor of black men often masks a vicious bestiality, at no time more vividly manifested after emancipation. The film is based on The Clansmen, a novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr., a native of North Carolina and popular Baptist preacher who wanted to awaken the American people to the nature of the Black Peril. To Dixon, this was a national problem. The presence of the Negro, North and South, endangered American civilization and the sanctity of white womanhood, and it posed as great a threat in 1900 as it did in 1868. "There is enough negro blood here," a Dixon character warns, "to make mulatto the whole Republic." That obsession consumed Dixon, and the film -- true to its intentions -- plays on the presumed primitve sexuality of the subhuman black man and its implications for the survival of the Anglo-Saxon race. The image is driven home in imagery no audience could easily forget. Before riding off to redeem the white South, klansmen dip their emblem into the blood of a blonde white virgin who has been terrorized by a black brute.
This is the film shown by the request of President Woodrow Wilson at theWhite House in 1914. Three years later the United States entered a war in Europe that Wilson said would make the world safe for democracy. After the command showing, Wilson reportedly said: "My only regret is that it [the film] is all so terribly true."
All contents © 1996 William M. Brinton
All photographs © Archive Photos, New York
All film © Archive Film, New York