Great Fortunes from Railroads

by Gustavus Myers

THE GREAT LABOR MOVEMENT OF 1886

Now, to the intense alarm of all sections of the capitalist class, a very different quality of movement reared itself upward from the deeps of the social formation. [Footnote: It may be asked why an extended description of this movement is interposed here. Because, inasmuch as it is a part of the plan of this work to present a constant succession of contrasts, this is, perhaps, as appropriate a place as any to give an account of the highly important labor movement of 1886. Of course, it will be understood that this movement was not the result of any one capitalist fortune or process, but was a general revolt to compel all forms of capitalist control to concede better conditions to the workers.]

This time it was the laboring masses preparing for the most vigorous and comprehensive attack that they had ever made upon capitalism's intrenchments. Long exploited, oppressed and betrayed, starved or clubbed into intervals of apathy or submission, they were again in motion, moving forward with a set deliberation and determination which disconcerted the capitalist class. No mere local conflict of class interests was it on this occasion, but a general cohesive revolt of the workers against some of the conditions and laws under which they had to labor.

In 1884 the Federation of Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada had issued a manifesto calling upon all trades to unite in the demand for an eight-hour workday. The date for a general strike was finally fixed for May 1, 1886. The year 1886, therefore, was one of general agitation throughout the United States. With rapidity and enthusiasm the movement spread. Presently it took on a radical character. Realizing it to be at basis the first national awakening of the proletariat, progressive men and women of every shade of opinion hastened forward to support it and direct it into one of opposition, not merely to a few of the evils of wage slavery, but to what they considered the fundamental cause itself—the capitalist system.

The propertied classes were not deceived. They knew that while this labor movement nominally confined itself to one for a shorter workday, yet its impetus was such that it contained the fullest potentialities for developing into a mighty uprising against the very system by which they were enabled to enrich themselves and enslave the masses.

The moment this fact was discerned, both great and small capitalists instinctively suspended hostilities. They tacitly agreed to hold their bitter warfare for supremacy in abeyance, and unite in the face of their common danger. The triangular conflict between the large and small capitalists and the trades unions now resolved into a duel between the propertied classes of all descriptions on the one hand, and, on the other, the workingmen's organizations. The Farmers' Alliance, essentially a middle-class movement of the employing farmers in the South and West, was counted upon as aligned with the propertied classes. On the part of the capitalists there was no unity of organization in the sense of selected leaders or committees. It was not necessary. A stronger bond than that of formal organization drove them into acting in conscious unison—namely, the immediate peril involved to their property interests. Apprehension soon gave way to grim decision. This formidable labor movement had to be broken and dispersed at any cost.

But how was the work of destruction to be done? This was the predicament. Vested wealth could succeed in bribing a labor leader here and there; but the movement had bounded far beyond the elemental stage, and had become a glowing agitation which no traitor or set of traitors could have stopped.

One effective way of discrediting and suppressing it there was; the ancient one of virtually outlawing it, and throwing against it the whole brute force of Government. The task of putting it down was preŽminently one for the police, army and judiciary. They had been used to stifle many another protest of the workers; why not this? As the great labor movement rolled on, enlisting the ardent attachment of the masses, denouncing the injustices, corruption and robberies of the existing industrial system, the propertied classes more acutely understood that they must hasten to stamp it out by whatever means. The municipal and State governments and the National Government, completely representing their interests and ideas, and dominated by them, stood ready to use force. But there had to be some kind of pretext. The hosts of labor were acting peacefully and with remarkable self control and discipline.

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THE PROPERTIED CLASSES STRIKE BACK.

The propitious occasion soon came. It was in Chicago that the blow was struck which succeeded in discrediting the cause of the workers, stayed the progress of their movement, and covered it with a prejudice and an odium lasting for years. There, in that maddening bedlam, called a city, the acknowledged inferno of industrialism, the agitation was tensest. With its brutalities, cruelties, corruptions and industrial carnage, its hideous contrasts of dissolute riches and woe-begone poverty, its arrogant wealth lashing the working population lower and lower into squalor, pauperism and misery, Chicago was overripe for any movement seeking to elevate conditions.

In the first months of 1886, strike followed strike throughout the United States for an eight-hour day. At McCormick's reaper works in Chicago [Footnote: The McCormick fortune was the outgrowth, to a large extent, of a variety of frauds and corruptions. Later on in this work, the facts are given as to how Cyrus H. McCormick, the founder of the fortune, bribed Congress, in 1854, to give him a time extension of his patent rights.] a prolonged strike of many months began in February. Determined not only to refuse shorter hours, but to force his twelve hundred wage workers to desert labor unions, McCormick drove them from his factory, hired armed mercenaries, called Pinkerton detectives, and substituted in the place of the union workers those despised irresponsibles called "scabs"— signifying laborers willing to help defeat the battles of organized labor, and, if the unions won, share in the benefits without incurring any of the responsibilities, risks or struggles. On May 1, 1886, forty thousand men and women in Chicago went on strike for an eight-hour day. Thus far, the aim of inciting violence on the part of the strikers had completely failed everywhere.

The Knights of Labor were conducting their strikes with a coolness, method and sober sense of order, giving no opportunity for the exercise of force. On May 2, a great demonstration of the McCormick workers was held near that company's factories to protest against the employment of armed Pinkertons. The Pinkerton detective bureau was a private establishment, founded during the Civil War; in the ensuing contests between labor and capital it was alleged to have made a profitable business of supplying spies and armed men to capitalists under the pretense of safeguarding property. These armed bands really constituted private armies; recruited often from the most debased and worthless part of the population, as well as from the needy and shifty, they were, it was charged, composed largely of men who would perjure themselves, fabricate evidence, provoke trouble, and slaughter without scruple for pay. Some, as was well established, were ex-convicts, others thugs, and still others were driven to the ignoble employment by necessity. [Footnote: The prevailing view of the working class toward the Pinkerton detectives was thus expressed at the time in a chapter on the mine workers by John McBride, one of the trade union leaders: "They have awakened," he wrote, "the hatred and detestation of the workingmen of the United States; and this hatred is due, not only to the fact that they protect the men who are stealing the bread from the mouths of the families of strikers, but to the fact that as a class they seem rather to invite trouble than to allay it…. They are employed to terrorize the workingmen, and to create in the minds of the public the idea that the miners are a dangerous class of citizens that have to be kept down by armed force. These men had an interest in keeping up and creating troubles which gave employers opportunity to demand protection from the State militia at the expense of the State, and which the State has too readily granted."—"The Labor Movement": 264-265.] During the course of the meeting in the afternoon the factory bell rung, and the "scabs" were seen leaving. Some boys in the audience began throwing stones and there was hooting. Fully aware of the combustible accounts wanted by their offices, the reporters immediately telephoned exaggerated, inflammatory stories of a riot being under way; the police on the spot likewise notified headquarters. [Footnote: In a statement published in the Chicago "Daily News," issue of May 10, 1889, Captain Ebersold, chief of police in 1886, charged that Captain Schaack, who had been the police official most active in proceeding against the labor leaders and causing them to be executed and imprisoned, had deliberately set about concocting "anarchist" conspiracies in order to get the credit for discovering and breaking them up.] Police in large numbers soon arrived; the boys kept throwing stones; and suddenly, without warning, the police drew their revolvers and indiscriminately opened a general fire upon the men, women and children in the crowd, killing four and wounding many. Terror stricken and in horror the crowd fled.

There was a group of radical spirits in Chicago, popularly branded as anarchists, but in reality men of advanced ideas who, while differing from one another in economic views, agreed in denouncing the existing system as the prolific cause of bitter wrongs and rooted injustices. Sincere, self-sacrificing, intellectual, outspoken, absolutely devoted to their convictions, burning with compassion and noble ideals for suffering humanity, they had stepped forward and had greatly assisted in arousing the militant spirit in the working class in Chicago. At all of the meetings they had spoken with an ardor and ability that put them in the front ranks of the proletarian leaders; and in two newspapers published by them, the "Alarm," in English, and the "Arbeiter Zeitung," in German, they unceasingly advocated the interests of the working class. These men were Albert R. Parsons, a printer, editor of the "Alarm;" August Spies, an upholsterer by trade, and editor of the "Arbeiter Zeitung;" Adolph Fischer, a printer; Louis Lingg, a carpenter; Samuel Fielden, the son of a British factory owner; George Engel, a painter; Oscar Neebe, a well- to-do business man, and Michael Schwab, a bookbinder. All of them were more or less deep students of economics and sociology; they had become convinced that the fundamental cause of the prevalent inequalities of opportunity and of the widespread misery was the capitalist system itself. Hence they opposed it uncompromisingly. [Footnote: The utterances of these leaders revealed the reasons why they were so greatly feared by the capitalist class. Fischer, for instance, said: "I perceive that the diligent, never-resting human working bees, who create all wealth and fill the magazines with provisions, fuel and clothing, enjoy only a minor part of this product, while the drones, the idlers, keep the warehouses locked up, and revel in luxury and voluptuousness." Engel said: "The history of all times teaches us that the oppressing always maintain their tyrannies by force and violence. Some day the war will break out; therefore all workingmen should unite and prepare for the last war, the outcome of which will be the end forever of all war, and bring peace and happiness to mankind.">[

The newspapers, voicing the interests and demands of the intrenched classes, denounced these radicals with a sinister emphasis as destructionists. But it was not ignorance which led them to do this; it was intended as a deliberate poisoning and inflaming of public opinion. Themselves bribing, corrupting, intimidating, violating laws and slaying for profit everywhere, the propertied classes ever assumed, as has so often been pointed out, the pose of being the staunch conservers of law and order. To fasten upon the advanced leaders of the labor movement the stigma of being sowers of disorder, and then judicially get rid of them, and crush the spirit and movement of the aroused proletariat—this was the plan determined upon. Labor leaders who confined their programme to the industrial arena were not feared so much; but Parsons, Spies and their comrades were not only pointing out to the masses truths extremely unpalatable to the capitalists, but were urging, although in a crude way, a definite political movement to overthrow capitalism. With the finest perception, fully alert to their danger, the propertied classes were intent upon exterminating this portentous movement by striking down its leaders and terrifying their followers.