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CHAPTER XIII: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HOUSE OF LABOR
Glory Glory Hallelujah: Agrarianism, Labor, and Jesus in the American Middle West
There tends to be a misnomer that industrial progress and “civilization” – only ever in the form of a sterile metropolis like the one described by Oswald Spengler – came to the Midwest and American West through the rise of capitalism and industrialization. The people, towns, and local economies of the Midwest were robust and diverse prior to the arrival of mechanization and universalization that was pressed onto the Midwest, Great Plains, and Mountain West by Boston and New York industrialists, capitalists, and bankers. Many towns which were diversified between local river businesses, small scale coal mining, farming, and family shops that codified together in a functioning small town that, well into the mid-20th century, was the picturesque landscape of the “American ideal.”Glory Glory Hallelujah: Agrarianism, Labor, and Jesus in the American Middle West
One of the more peculiar aspects of the American populist, agrarian, and labor movements – at least comparatively speaking – was its deeply self-righteous and religious nature. While it is true that Christian socialism influenced the emergent pre-Marxist schools of socialism in Britain and France, the relationship between Christianity and the populist movement in America was not, as it was perhaps in France, the secularization of Christian eschatological and socio-political principles into the utopian socialism of Fourier and Saint-Simon – though Felicité Robert de Lamennais was certainly among the more influential explicitly Christian (Catholic) socialist thinkers. And neither was the Christian socialism in Britain, which eventually was the foundation of the Labour Party, comparable to the Christian socialism of America. America’s populism, laborism, and agrarianism, was deeply eschatological in nature. Whereas in Europe the “humanization” of end-times utopianism blended nicely with the Whig faith in progress, thereby casting Europe’s Christian socialism as less eschatological and more progressive, eventually giving way to social democracy, the case of America was that the populist movement might as well seen itself as the persecuted faithful against the forces of Babylon (New York and Boston) and that it understood itself in this struggle as ushering in the millennium.
The reality of America’s millenarian founding and consciousness is often difficult for Europeans to understand. From the Puritans, to even the Cavalier migrants, those who flocked to America did so under intense persecution and fear. Their old world was dying. The new world which they flocked to was now the final battle ground between the forces of good and the encroachment of evil. This dualism runs at the heart of American culture and politics, with stark and sharp contrasts between good and evil one of the bedrock principles of the culture of American politics that is deeply sown in her soil.
Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, published in 1957, was a landmark and classic work in studying the theologico-political question. Cohn argued, convincingly, that the Western World’s obsession with utopianism, socialism, and revolutionary politics, emanated from Christian millenarian movements. Though long condemned by the Catholic Church, millenarian movements flourished under the Protestant Reformation. Most historical and confessional Protestant traditions: Lutheranism, Anabaptism, Baptism, Congregationalism, and Puritanism, were explicitly millenarian at their inception. Cohn’s work was particularly well-received by Marxists in France. Though, to be fair, Freidrich Engels already acknowledged the debt to revolutionary politics to Christian millenarianism and Protestantism, in particular, in his work The Peasant War in Germany.
Americans have long fancied themselves as God’s almost-chosen people. America’s restlessness, from her millenarian beginnings, to her restless and relentless march westward, to her spirit of reformism and revolution, was very much the anguished heart of Augustine crying out for the Lord. The apocalyptic frontier life of America’s westward trek gave even further weight to the inculcation of dramatic apocalyptic religion. The newly opened western frontiers were home to new millenarian movements like the Latter Days Saints and Millerites, both egalitarian and socialist and exceedingly democratic in their inception. Somewhat ironic given today’s economic beliefs among the heirs of Joseph Smith’s movement.
The livelihood of the Midwest and Western, and even southern and southwestern farmers, laborers, and small towns, were put under pressure as capitalists from Boston and New York, who had not braved the fires and storms of trial to carve a path of civilization into the barren landscape of “Middle America,” as they swept in to bring the “industrial revolution” to these virgin lands. The pluralistic and robust towns that dotted the Middle West of America were, by and large, not yet industrialized. Though some cities were quick to industrialize, the large concentration of farms, craftsmen, and skilled laborers, meant that the Middle West would be amble territory for the nascent labor movement to emerge.
America’s labor movement was dominated by Catholics, this much is known. But it was also dominated by pietistic German Lutherans, especially in the Upper Midwest. It is again hard for people so detached from consciousness of the Christian to understand the relationship between labor and Christianity. When Adam was expelled from the Garden and condemned toil the land as punishment for sin, Christians had longed read the spirit of labor as pious acceptance of God’s just punishment that would one day be rewarded for the work they had done (Rom. 2:6). Likewise, rather than waiting for the Second Coming, Paul exhorts the faithful to labor until the Final Victory (1 Th. 4:11-12).
The cultivation of the fruit and vine that is such a common motif in Christianity, was, in many ways, countercultural. Manual labor and craftsmanship was seen as something honorable and pious. A fulfillment of not only the divine workmanship mandate of Genesis 2, but, as already stated, pious acceptance of labor as punishment for sin. The great German biblical and cultural critic, Gustav Wohlenberg, also noted that the growing rejection of the honor of labor in the first and second century world of antiquity was another reason for Christianity’s positive reception of earlier Greco-Roman thinkers and philosophers like Aristotle, Cicero, and Cato who had all praised the honorability and piety of practical labor and hard-work.[1] After all, it was Cicero who maintained that the glory and honor of the Roman Republic was found in the countryside villa and small farms and not the bourgeois merchants and traders of the cities.
Working the frontier life. Men and women both worked the frontiers, giving rise to independent and industrious women who were also mothers. The necessity of women working the frontiers, along with men, is one of the reasons why many scholars believe the rise of women’s suffrage started in the American frontier before spreading eastward to the urban cities and established lives were women of well-off families lived comfortable lives. Because one's family life depended on industrious women, women played an integral role in "pacifying" the frontier and, in turn, felt they should have the same political rights as their husbands.
With the Middle West comprised of many pious German Protestants, immigrant Catholics, and Protestant revivalists, the Middle West became the new bed of America’s Christian consciousness which passed from New England and the Mid Atlantic westward. Additionally, the large presence of politically repressed Catholics turned to the nascent labor unions as their only means of political power and representation. This was not only true in the Middle West, but also in the eastern cities. Part of the tangle between big business and labor in the Gilded Age was the grandstanding White Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocracy and its historic anti-Catholicism.
Even the Middle West Protestants were exceedingly friendly to laborism and agrarianism because that was their entire livelihood. As far as they were concerned, the “Protestant” businessmen from the east were the renegade and blasphemous false teachers that Paul and John had warned about in their writings. Add to the fact that many of the Middle West settlers were fleeing and persecuted peoples from Europe, fled to America in the midst of political and economic turmoil and famine, or were southern refugees escaping the fire and destruction of the Deep South and Old South after the Civil War, it should be unsurprising that they saw themselves as under siege yet again when Brahmin capitalists from Boston and New York fled westward to seize the riches of the untapped lands.
***
Part of the northeastern push to the west was because of the Civil War. It was easy for vengeful southerners to cast New England Yankees as carpetbaggers in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. In reality, the real battleground against the carpet baggers, if one is to use that term, was in the American Middle West.
The destruction of slavery had a negative effect on New England’s economy. The industries, especially the textile industry, now deprived of cheap labor, had to look elsewhere to find the goods, resources, and labor necessary to continue to feed itself and the burgeoning cities on the coast. To this end the Boston Brahmin, in particular, leveraged their wealth and political capital over the railroads and the labor propping up to complete railroad transportation to their benefits. The rails linked Middle West towns together, this is true, but they were all geared with the end of transporting Middle Western goods and resources back to their factories in New England.[2]
For the millenarian and pietistic Protestants in America’s frontier, this was the quintessential manifestation of the “mark of the beast” from Revelation, which was always interpreted in the light of political-economy. It was necessary to have the mark of the beast to participate in Satan’s economy. Thus, looking out at their flight to this “virgin land,” and then reflecting on their plight and now invasion from the servants of mammon, it all made sense to the apocalyptically conscience-driven Christians in these lands. As such, they fought back the only way that they knew how, or was, permissible: politics.
Many of the revivals that sprang up in the American Middle West, led by the circuit riders of the Methodists, the Lutheran pietists, Baptists, and Catholic labor organizers, all coalesced around the same theme: democracy. This is the great and, to some, embarrassing secret of American democracy: it went hand in hand with Christianity. This did create a new and dangerous blending of theological-politics, that God, the gospel, and Jesus were all supportive of democracy. The generally a-political New Testament was transformed into a document of democracy – with Protestant preachers reading back onto the Old Testament God’s condemnation of monarchy and the kings as evidence that God always preferred a sort of tribal democracy which the Israelites rejected and were, as a result, punished.
A Methodist camp revival. Most honest historians have long argued that the Christianization of the western frontiers also impacted the growth of America’s democratic spirit.
The struggle over labor and capitalism in the American Middle West now took on a deeply theological dimension. The success of labor and agrarianism, now tied to democratic populism, was also tied to God’s Providential hand in history. The triumph of capitalism, the robber barons, and the destruction of the unpolluted Garden that was the American frontier, seen as nothing less than the unleashing of Satan and the battle for the millennium just around the corner. It is telling that few people are even aware of this reality, though it be deeply rooted and much discussed in academic circles.
[1] Gustav Wohlenberg, Der erste und zweite Thessalonicherbrief, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament (Leipzig: Deichert, 1903), 93.
[2] Read Noam Maggor’s Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age for a fuller treatment of this subject.
SUGGESTED READING
Heath W. Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago
Herbert Gutman, “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Oct., 1966): 74-101.
Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity
Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age
Heath W. Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago
Herbert Gutman, “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Oct., 1966): 74-101.
Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity
Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age
Sorry it took so long to reply and I read the most recent addition to the AAR and I must admit that this is slowly becoming one of my favorite AARs. I actually come from Utah so I must admit my surprise from how different of a world view that lays a hop, skip, and a jump over the mountains. From the what I learned in school about the gilded age was about corrupt and same minded politics, railroad barons and failure of the anti-railroad movements, and lastly booming commerce on the coasts vs. the poor settlers in the interior. I must admit that all of this is a nice change of pace to learn about.That might depend on where you're from. As a native Midwesterner, Ohioan, who grew up in a printing factory family, deeply intertwined with the Teamsters, and have worked 12 hour days myself (granted, with the overtime pay), it's still fairly prominent in some corners of the world and the United States. But a lot of it is not so much cast by the wayside as it is being completely eviscerated at present and causing a lot of ramifications that coastal elites don't care about.
Grew up singing this song at night under the Milky Way sky and next to a bond fire:
And I shall not speak of my experiences here at Yale with all those "pro-working class" chardonnay liberals and "compassionate Republicans" and what they actually say about us behind closed doors and in their classrooms.
While we seek mirth and beauty, and music light and gay
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times come again no more!
There's a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o'er:
Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times come again no more!
We'll be rectifying a lot of things in these coming chapters few people have heard of, or are familiar with!
Some of the best American songs, are folk songs. Or anything by Stephen Foster.
Also on the subject of Joseph Smith although you're not wrong about the attempts of the united order and such being social welfare but he wouldn't be surprised by how things are now mostly because he was there for the system we now live under for the most part.
Well I thank you for the kind words. Of course, the trick of the AAR is taking away the rich history and historiography that is simply re-written to conform to new dates and game events. Otherwise, I'm staying largely true to historical sources and reality. My B.A. in history was split between US and Islamic, with a minor in Ancient, and a condensed form of my primary US work was eventually published in a journal, so whilst I do not do "History" anymore, I'm still a historian. Most of my current scholarly work is history insofar that much of commentaries and exegeses on philosophical works and their influences lead me to claim to be a "historian of philosophy" more than anything else.
Part of the problem with the stereotypical picture is that it is oversimplified and, in many cases, deeply misleading. The interior states were fairly wealthy comparatively speaking, and owed little public debt compared to the sharp contrasts in wealth on east coast between the wealthy elite and the impoverished working classes. As these capitalists and financiers moved out of NYC and Boston to the western frontier states, they brought with them dramatic transformation that really hit many communities hard. The newly impoverished communities that sprang up in the western states were the quintessential railroad and coal company towns that were then flooded by immigrants trekking westward to escape the squalor of the east coast cities and finding the faux promise of "opportunity" in these places. Longstanding towns and villages and farmsteads were fairly well off but subsequently suffered suffocating changes with the influx of "industrialization" and the creation of the railroad networks drained the agricultural and mineral industries since most of the goods went to the northeast to feed the industries there leaving the Midwestern industries and towns subservient to their coastal feeders.
I, personally, have very strong feelings about the northeast -- especially after having spent these last two years at Yale where I've bluntly heard northeasterns speak truly of what they think of "Fascist America."
All the feigned support for working-class individuals and families. Well, I have a B.A. in economics too. What is not good for the working-class, especially those of us who are from union households (and Ohio contains 4.5% of all union households in the U.S., which is to say that almost 1 out of every 20 American union members come from my native state), is to flood the labor market with cheap unskilled labor. I know many Democrats, myself included, who harbor strong disdain for the coastal elites who run the party and bark down at us to "get with the program." That animosity goes all the way back to the Gilded Age and further back as earlier chapters highlighted. In my state, for instance, anything that might involve ramifications for labor unions is quite an important issue.The anti-RR movement wasn't so much a failure but just crushed by weight and power of the northeastern backers and financiers who eviscerated the anti-RR movement with their political clout and power. Same-minded politics was certainly not the case either. There was a tremendous dialectic between the populists (found in the Populist Party, Democratic and Republican parties) vs. what is essentially the "establishment."
But this shouldn't spoil where much of Part IV is going and will be dealing about. A good, and necessary, corrective to how most people perceive this era. A very influential and consequential one which we are still, in some respects, dealing with even today.
You know, I own a copy of a 1981 official edition, of the Book of Mormon printed from Utah. It's among my prized library possessions. We'll probably deal with the now lost 1915 film Life of Nephi. Mormons were early pioneers in film which I'll deal with when we get to it. May be of interest to you but Kirtland Temple in Ohio was not far from where I grew up. I believe it is the first temple to have been built by the Latter Day Saints. And never was destroyed, though I believe the Community of Christ are the stewards of it today. The Mormons had such the pioneer spirit. God prefers pioneers and shepherds you know! And his spirit is like a fire burning. Very millenarian.
I must say, this is a great way to study for APUSH!
Hahaha. Oh I remember high school social studies, US, AP, and Govt. days. I won the awards too back then. Not sure if what I'm covering is what they want on your AP Test, and all my dates and events are a bit f*ed up because of the new timeline! Obviously you don't want the Civil War to be 1860-1863.
Though, for your edification, you can always read a condensed and published article on my time in US History as an undergraduate, dealing a lot, actually, with the era we're in and the era to come. Claiming Thomas Jefferson: The Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian Genesis of American Progressivism. Three years ago now, time flies!
I think the thing we learn from history is that everyone says one thing and does another - even those with honorable intentions. Good deeds often come about from selfish motives.
I didn't 'get' Elvis either until I saw the documentary 'The Searcher'. Early on, he was an amazing performer who descended into sorrow, drugs and self-parody from overwork, critical stunting and then divorce. He was touring doing from 100 to 180 shows a year, year after year... I hadn't realized that he didn't write music, and didn't exercise a lot of control over his career. But as a live performer, up through the Vegas years, he could really shake a room.
I didn't 'get' Elvis either until I saw the documentary 'The Searcher'. Early on, he was an amazing performer who descended into sorrow, drugs and self-parody from overwork, critical stunting and then divorce. He was touring doing from 100 to 180 shows a year, year after year... I hadn't realized that he didn't write music, and didn't exercise a lot of control over his career. But as a live performer, up through the Vegas years, he could really shake a room.
I was much the same way growing up, but learning more, I've come to appreciate Elvis a lot more. He was a superb entertainer and had a very good voice too. Wouldn't have guessed Elvis would had made it into this "AAR" all things considered. But hey, I thought it was appropriate given the direction of the AAR and what we'll focus on contrary popular depictions of the 1880s-1920s, and folk/blues Americana captures that ethos and culture very well! Plus, I've always loved Folk Americana.
Sooner or later every conversation mentions Elvis, Hitler and butter. Make of that what you will. LOL.
As tempting as it is, can we please leave the RL political discussions for the history and OT boards? Thank you.
CHAPTER XIII: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HOUSE OF LABOR
Organizing Labor
Organizing Labor
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the organization of labor was, in of itself, rooted in the longstanding lineage of semi-organized and skill laborers and their associations reaching back for decades and centuries in the colonies and through early American statehood. That the city of Columbus, Ohio, was the location for the formal inauguration of American Federation of Labor in 1886, is a testimony to the strong concentration of skilled laborers in the American Midwest. To this end I must state the formation of labor unions was, itself, a largely nationalist endeavor as it related to the history of America.
Most of the early unions were made up of professional craftsmen and other skilled workers rather than unskilled workers. Many were longstanding Americans in citizenship lineage, their fathers and grandfathers having been Americans. The immigrant union community, largely Catholic, was itself on the upward trend of moderately skilled labor, having fallen into the industrial and laboring industries upon arrival and, following Irish and German Catholic service to the Union during the Civil War, were largely seen as part of the American fabric despite perpetual suspicion of the Papist religion.
Samuel Gompers, for instance, the first head of the Federation of Labor, though from England, was the embodiment of the laboring ethos of White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. The birth of the factories and railroad industries established a contest between America’s skilled, moderately skilled, and organized labor forces, against the cheap and unskilled labor forces of Eastern European, continuous Irish, and Chinese immigrants. If the United States, and the Midwest in particular, had to fall under capitalist and industrial prey and development, let it be so with skilled American workers with certain rights and protection at the helm. After all, as any economics 101 student learns, flooding the labor market with cheap and unskilled labor is something that is exceedingly beneficial to businesses. It is not, however, beneficial to standing trade unions and skilled workers who are often the losing party in such economic dynamics.
A portrait of the English-born American labor leader Samuel Gompers, head of the Federation of Labor.
Murray Bookchin, that great 20th century American anarcho-socialist and former Marxist, described his leaving of Marxism and embracing of anarcho-socialism primarily as rooted in his experiences as a labor organizer. For all the talk of Marx, he said, Marx was wrong that the unions were the source of revolutionary potential. For Bookchin, the labor unions were quintessentially conservative in disposition. To that end Bookchin was simply following the philosopher Frank Tannenbaum who, in his work A Philosophy of Labor (1951), remarked that, “The trade union movement is conservative and counterrevolutionary just because it is creative. It builds, step by step, and the design expands as a series of new institutions that govern the entire man and increasingly rule the world wherein he has his entire being…in practice, though not in words, it denies the heritage that stems from the French Revolution and from English liberalism…this is why the trade union is a repudiation of the individualism of the French Revolution and the liberalism of the English utilitarian philosophers.”[1] If conservatism is about communitarianism, the concrete to concrete, relational recognition, humanism, anti-atomism, anti-alienation, and implicitly anti-capitalist on grounds that capitalism is individualistic (rather than communitarian), and a force for driving atomization and alienation, as conservative luminaries like Edmund Burke and Klemens von Metternich knew, then the labor movement in America was undoubtedly conservative.
To that end, Gompers was a strong opponent of immigration as were most of the young and emergent labor unions that had formed in the 1870s-1890s. The unions themselves were motivated by, to my count, three principal causes: industrialization, immigration, and ongoing cultural changes. The unions were not so much opposed to industrialization as they sought checks and controls on the process of industrialization to minimize the exploitation of labor. The unions were universally opposed to immigration because, as mentioned, the unions were deeply nationalistic and believed that American work belonged to American workers. To this end the unions were moved by a certain fear of ongoing cultural changes wrought by immigration and how this related to the issue of American work for American workers. It was, in a new iteration, another example of “Irish need not apply.”
***
The farmer unions, however, were more stringently opposed to industrialization than the trade unions which accommodated industrialization. The encroachment into the farming heartlands of the Upper Midwest and Great Plains caused newfound hardship on the agrarian ideals of many of these communities. With the birth of the railroads came seizure of farmland and farming communities – the ties to the land going back two and sometimes three generations uprooted as the unstoppable march of progress plowed through the prairies. The transformation of towns and communities into sprawling squalor infested company workshops with whatever produce the farmers were producing going to feed the pocket books of the railroad companies and the stomachs of the railroad workers, forced to accept whatever price the bosses demanded as they cut off the ability – with control of the railroads – for the farmers to export their produce elsewhere.
Growing resentment to immigrant laborers who did not speak English, or poor English, the spikes in crime that occurred through lack of good pay and support to the railroad workers – with the established towns that were being sucked dry to supply the march of the railroads the primary targets of desperate crime – and the depletion of the land which the farmers had nurtured and taken care of, were all causes for the swelling populist tide and sentiment in the lands that would eventually propel William Jennings Bryan to victory. Richard Hofstadter, that most eminent of 20th century American historians, aptly described the populist movement as having been characterized by, “provincial resentments, popular and democratic rebelliousness and suspiciousness, and nativism.”[2] Any American, unlike the most illiterate of writers for the Washington Post or New York Times, who actually has a knowledge of American culture and history, should not be surprised with recent political events. As Hofstadter also wrote, this tradition of American democratic populism and nativism “has survived in our own time.”[3] And, this tide of “provincial resentments, popular and democratic rebelliousness and suspiciousness, and nativism,” though equally found in the Republican Party in this part of America, was the heart and soul of the Democratic Party when William Jennings Bryan and the populist movement captured the Democratic Party before dying a slow death with the rise of the progressives and further causing a division between the populist, nativistic, rural, and labor oriented Democratic Parties that dotted the states of the American heartland with the progressive, internationalist, and capitalist Democrats who entrenched themselves along the coasts.
A political cartoon depicting the feelings of the populists in the American heartland and their relationship to the railroads, Washington D.C., and the capitalist class headed in Boston and New York.
The odd dynamics which fueled the rise of organized labor in America was, then, one of resentment and desperation. It was resentment toward the intrusion of capitalists from Boston and New York and their railroad monopolies into lands that people had worked for generations, some as long as a hundred years. It was resentment toward the flux of cheap immigrant labor that transformed the landscape of these towns and communities which led to uneasy relationships between the rooted communities and the migratory immigrant laborers moving westward with the march of the railroad companies with little concern for the health and wellbeing of the lands in which they were to work temporarily before moving to the next town to cause havoc and mayhem. It was resentment toward the possibility of American laborers being passed over in favor of cheaper laborers to ensure the high profits and profitability of the factory barons.
This returns us then to Frank Tannanbaum’s recognition that the labor movement was always conservative and counterrevolution – it was reactionary to its very core. It had arisen in reaction to ongoing social and economic changes – just like most of the older episodes of American labor radicalism had arisen in reaction to changes in economic and social development in the previous centuries and decades. Those English utilitarian liberals had defined freedom as the absence of barriers to unimpeded motion. For the economy to be truly free, which meant the free motion of capital and economic development without barriers to restrict such movement and development, the labor unions stood as a barrier that needed to either be destroyed or tamed. The second half of the story of the rise and fall of the house of labor is the drama of attempting to destroy the labor unions, realizing that this was untenable, then transitioning to tame the labor unions and incorporate them into the larger system of the political economy.
[1] Frank Tannenbaum, A Philosophy of Labor, pp. 3, 10-11.
[2] Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, p. 5.
[3] Ibid.
SUGGESTED READING
Richard Hofstadater, The Age of Reform
Frank Tannenbaum, A Philosophy of Labor
Checking in to let you know that I'm still following this with interest
Also eagerly looking forward to seeing what becomes of Henry George and his Single Tax Movement, since we're starting to get into that territory -- I believe you've already alluded to him succeeding in his run for Mayor of New York in this world; how much is that going to shake things up?
Also eagerly looking forward to seeing what becomes of Henry George and his Single Tax Movement, since we're starting to get into that territory -- I believe you've already alluded to him succeeding in his run for Mayor of New York in this world; how much is that going to shake things up?
It's nice that the host added the enlarged bold text so as to allow others to be able to read the small word scratch from the original. Makes it more powerful. American populism, class resentment, regional discontent, and anti-corporatism, just about as American as Apple Pie and Baseball for those with a real knowledge of American history! Past parallels with today are nothing new at all -- perhaps the authAAR of this AAR is pushing that esoterically throughout the work!
Checking in to let you know that I'm still following this with interest
Also eagerly looking forward to seeing what becomes of Henry George and his Single Tax Movement, since we're starting to get into that territory -- I believe you've already alluded to him succeeding in his run for Mayor of New York in this world; how much is that going to shake things up?
No, I don't believe I have. We've discussed George before in PMs between us, I don't think I've made mention of him or referenced him in the AAR. But if I did that must have been long ago and we're approaching 1.5 years of work so if it was earlier I may just forgotten. Though I figured I would bring up Progress and Poverty at some point since it's relevant to the era we're dealing with.
If you did, it was only incidentally at best -- so it might well not be your faulty memory
CHAPTER XIII: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HOUSE OF LABOR
The Farmers Strike Back: The Great Railroad Strike of 1877
The Farmers Strike Back: The Great Railroad Strike of 1877
The place of labor within the populist movement was essential. Populism and labor went hand-in-glove, though labor, in this case, is more encompassing than those affiliated with formal labor unions. As already mentioned, the labor movement in America included skilled filial and independent craftsmen, lumber jacks, coal miners, railroad workers, steel workers, farmers, and just about anyone and everyone whose livelihood was made through physical toil. Populism, as it emerged in the 1870s and 1880s, was a movement that sought to utilize the power of state and federal government to redirect political policy and programs to the masses rather than the few.
Coinciding with the height of the Gilded Age, populism was not an anti-government movement, per se. Though suspicious of the rampant corruption and collusion of big business and East Coast financiers with elected officials, populists were optimistic insofar that they believed “good” officials and politicians could be elected to kick out the corrupt and direct the energies of good government back to the American people. As Richard Hofstadter said, however, American populism was ripe with regional and demographic resentment. It was nationalistic, anti-immigrant, and a decidedly working-class movement.
Populism was popular in what most Americans nowadays call “Flyover Country.” Populism flourished from the Appalachian to Rocky Mountains, and populism was extensively diverse in composition. The urban centers in the American Midwest, in particular, could be associated with the labor-wing of the populist movement. And insofar that it was tied to the labor unions, was tied to the Democratic Party in these states. The rural areas were divided between Democratic and Republican loyalties, most inheriting the legacy of post-Civil War migration. Northern Midwestern states remained fervently Republican. Old stock agrarian families who bled for the cause of the Union regarded the Democratic Party with suspicion. Protestant nativists likewise looked at the Democratic Party with suspicion as many union laborers in the factories tended to be Catholic immigrants.
The more westward and southern states, though, were Democratic. The southern states’ loyalty to the Democratic Party should be self-explanatory. The more western states were battlegrounds between the two parties. But as many poor southern whites moved westward to start over again, they settled in westerly states and their farmsteads aligned with the Democrats. The rural American Midwest, in particular, could not reliably be claimed as Democratic or Republican; longstanding grievances separated the two parties. But insofar that the Republican Party, by and large, was never associated with the labor unions, this also meant that as industrialization and capitalization swept across the American Middle-West (Appalachia to the Rocky Mountains), the party which became associated with the emergent robber barons and capitalist class was the Republican Party, itself creating an internal split between the pro-business and, therefore, pro-Eastern Republicans and the more isolationist, agrarian, and anti-capitalist Republicans of the Great Plains.[1]
Coinciding with the height of the Gilded Age, populism was not an anti-government movement, per se. Though suspicious of the rampant corruption and collusion of big business and East Coast financiers with elected officials, populists were optimistic insofar that they believed “good” officials and politicians could be elected to kick out the corrupt and direct the energies of good government back to the American people. As Richard Hofstadter said, however, American populism was ripe with regional and demographic resentment. It was nationalistic, anti-immigrant, and a decidedly working-class movement.
Populism was popular in what most Americans nowadays call “Flyover Country.” Populism flourished from the Appalachian to Rocky Mountains, and populism was extensively diverse in composition. The urban centers in the American Midwest, in particular, could be associated with the labor-wing of the populist movement. And insofar that it was tied to the labor unions, was tied to the Democratic Party in these states. The rural areas were divided between Democratic and Republican loyalties, most inheriting the legacy of post-Civil War migration. Northern Midwestern states remained fervently Republican. Old stock agrarian families who bled for the cause of the Union regarded the Democratic Party with suspicion. Protestant nativists likewise looked at the Democratic Party with suspicion as many union laborers in the factories tended to be Catholic immigrants.
The more westward and southern states, though, were Democratic. The southern states’ loyalty to the Democratic Party should be self-explanatory. The more western states were battlegrounds between the two parties. But as many poor southern whites moved westward to start over again, they settled in westerly states and their farmsteads aligned with the Democrats. The rural American Midwest, in particular, could not reliably be claimed as Democratic or Republican; longstanding grievances separated the two parties. But insofar that the Republican Party, by and large, was never associated with the labor unions, this also meant that as industrialization and capitalization swept across the American Middle-West (Appalachia to the Rocky Mountains), the party which became associated with the emergent robber barons and capitalist class was the Republican Party, itself creating an internal split between the pro-business and, therefore, pro-Eastern Republicans and the more isolationist, agrarian, and anti-capitalist Republicans of the Great Plains.[1]
A political party ticket advocating the National Greekback Party, the first of a series of populist parties in America. The Greenbacks were strongest in the agrarian heartland of America during their short-lived existence.
To counter the crisis of capital and labor in the American frontier and heartlands, newspapers exploded across the new frontier. It is a common myth to think that media venues have been neutral, fair, or balanced. The first American newspapers were partisan mouthpieces of either Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism. This was no different in the 1870s and 1880s which saw a substantial increase in cheap newspapers and new political magazines in which most arose to defend the emergent populism while others, the more established newspapers, began to associate themselves with the pro-business, pro-industry, and pro-capitalist program of the frontier capitalist movement.
The regional resentment between the American northeast, the bastion of capitalism, and the American South and Heartlands, was magnified through this new political dynamic. Elected officials from these regions routinely mocked their colleagues from New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, who were seen as the faces of elitism and privilege. Likewise, the New England elite mocked the “backward” and “xenophobic” Americans living west of Appalachia. Nothing new grows under the sun after all. One Republican congressman from New York, in describing the emerging populist movement in 1880 (the Greenbacks), said, “The inhabitants of these districts were degraded, intemperate, ignorant, and criminal.”[2] A Democrat speaking of his Greenback opponent said, “he was very ignorant and a fool.”[3]
Establishment hostility to the emerging populist and labor movement could not be more pronounced. Newspapers associated with the populists, politicians associated with the populists, and the people supporting the populists, were all ridiculed as ignorant and foolish people. The Establishment cast themselves as the “arbiters of progress and liberty”[4] against the backward sentimentality and general ignorance of the reality of political governance and economic policy.
Whenever the establishment class was threatened by actual democratic uprising, the pushback against these mass movements was one of rhetorical ridicule followed up by the physical use of political power and force against them. If the media couldn’t break the populist movement, then the full force of private armed forces and American law enforcement would be used to break the back of labor. But the nascent American labor and populist movement would not take such physical and political violence laying down. The Reading Railroad Massacre saw about a dozen civilian deaths at the hands of US military and police forces. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the first great conflagration between the industrialists and populists, ended with over 150 worker and civilian deaths at the hands of the authorities.
A depiction of the Great Railroad Strikes of 1877, where American police and military forces killed over 150 American citizens.
But the beginning of the labor movement, and of American populism, was not the unions. As mentioned, labor had its origins on the American agrarian movement - the farmers. It was the farmers who first took their stand against the railroads cutting through their lands and bringing widespread destruction to farming communities and their landscapes. The farmers were the recipients of economic warfare on the part of Boston and New York financiers, who deliberately constricted the farming communities in the American Midwest knowing the farmers could not sustain themselves from suffering from de facto boycotts and debt. Railroad companies hiked their prices to deliberately break the power of the farmers and enslave them to the railroad companies. It was the greatest and most sinister display of class warfare in American history. Under increased pressures and debt the farmers established the Greenback Party, the first officially populist party, to try and remedy their situation. Anyone who says the American government and capitalist class hasn’t used all the means under their power to achieve their ends is a first class liar, or a benefactor of the establishment. The plight of the farmers and their destruction by economic and political forces was the first in a long train of abuses against the American commoner which would finally find its catharsis in Bryan’s election, even if that election meant little for the political clout and power of the American laboring movement.
1877 was a particularly violent year, the genesis of American populism, and one in which the populists would never forget. The "year of violence" as other historians have called it, gave the populists their battle cries against their corrupt overlords. Populists across the United States gained a heightened militancy and distrust of the establishment, local, state, and federal. They also increased their animosity toward law enforcement for obvious reasons. The presence of agents of the law meant that they had free hand in dealing with them while they (the populists) had little means to defend themselves - and if they did, it meant jail time.
[1] A notable example which bucked the trend of Republican association with capitalism and disassociation with the labor unions was in the state of Wisconsin, where the La Follette Family in Wisconsin, a family of Republicans, were strongly affiliated with the labor movement until the 1920s when the family spearheaded the first Progressive Party (1924-1946) which separated from the Republican Party for a more pro-labor, anti-immigrant, and agrarian politics.
[2] Actual quote.
[3] Actual quote.
[4] Another actual quote from a New York Republican Congressional Meeting in 1880 describing itself in contrast to the Greenbacks (Populists).
SUGGESTED READING
David Stowell, The Great Strikes of 1877
David Stowell, The Great Strikes of 1877
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There is indeed nothing new under the sun. It's honestly a little chilling how much of that still applies in the present day, with just a few adaptations to accommodate changes in culture, technology, and the jargon of the day.