Great Fortunes from Railroads

by Gustavus Myers

THE WORKERS' STRUGGLE FOR BETTER CONDITIONS.

Again and again the workers attempted to throw off some of their shackles, and every time the whole dominant force of society was arrayed against them. By 1825 an agitation developed for a ten-hour workday. The politicians denounced the movement; the cultured classes frowned upon it; the newspapers alternately ridiculed and abused it; the officials prepared to take summary action to put it down. As for the capitalists—the shipping merchants, the boot and shoe manufacturers, the iron masters and others—they not only denied the right of the workers to organize, while insisting that they themselves were entitled to combine, but they inveighed against the ten-hour demand as "unreasonable conditions which the folly and caprice of a few journeymen mechanics may dictate." "A very large sum of money," says McNeill, "was subscribed by the merchants to defeat the ten-hour movement." [Footnote: "The Labor Movement": 339.] And as an evidence of the intense opposition to the workers' demands for a change from a fourteen to a ten-hour day, McNeill quotes from a Boston newspaper of 1832:

Had this unlawful combination had for its object the enhancement of daily wages, it would have been left to its own care; but it now strikes the very nerve of industry and good morals by dictating the hours of labor, abrogating the good old rule of our fathers and pointing out the most direct course to poverty; for to be idle several of the most useful hours of the morning and evening will surely lead to intemperance and ruin.

These, generally speaking, were the stock capitalists arguments of the day, together with the further reiterated assertion that it was impossible to conduct business on a ten-hour day system. The effect of the fourteen-hour day upon the workers was pernicious. Having no time for reading, self-education, social intercourse or acquainting themselves with refinement, they often developed brutal propensities. In proportion to the length of time and the rigor with which they were exploited, they degenerated morally and intellectually. This was a well-known fact, and was frequently commented upon by contemporaneous observers. Their employers could not fail to know it, yet, with few exceptions, they insisted that any movement to shorten the day's labor was destructive of good morals.

This pronouncement, however, need not arouse comment. Ever has the propertied class set itself up as the lofty guardian of morals although actuated by sordid self-interest and nothing more. Many workers were driven to drink, crime and suicide by the exasperating and deteriorating conditions under which they had to labor. The moment that they overstepped the slightest bounds of law, in rushed the authorities with summary punishment. The prisons of the period were full of mechanics whom serfdom or poverty had stung on to commit some crime or other. However trifling the offence, or whatever the justifiable provocation, the law made no trades-union memorialized Congress to limit the hours of labor of those employed on the public works to ten hours a day. The pathos of this petition! So unceasingly had the workers been lied to by politicians, newspapers, clergy and employers, that they did not realize that in applying to Congress or to any legislature, that they were begging from men who represented the antagonistic interests of their own employers. After a short debate Congress laid the petition on the table. Congress at this very time was spinning out laws in behalf of capitalist interests; granting public lands, public funds, protective tariffs and manifold other measures demanded or lobbied for by existing or projected corporations.

A memorial of a "Portion of the Laboring Classes of the City of New York in Relation to The Money Market" complained to Congress in 1833 that the powers of the Government were used against the working class.

"You are not ignorant," they petitioned,

That our State Legislatures have, by a usurpation of power which is expressly withheld by our Federal Constitution, chartered many companies to engage in the manufacture of paper money; and that the necessities of the laboring classes have compelled them to give it currency.

The strongest argument against this measure is, that by licensing any man or set of men to manufacture money, instead of earning it, we virtually license them to take so much of the property of the community as they may happen to fancy, without contributing to it at all—an injustice so enormous that it is incapable of any defense and therefore needs no comment.

… That the profits of capital are abstracted from the earnings of labor, and that these deductions, like any other tax on industry, tend to diminish the value of money by increasing the price of all the fruits of labor, are facts beyond dispute; it is equally undeniable that there is a point which capitalists cannot exceed without injuring themselves, for when by their exertions they so far depreciate the value of money at home that it is sent abroad, many are thrown out of employ, and are not only disabled from paying their tribute, but are forced to betake to dishonest courses or starve.

This memorial was full of iron and stern truths, although much of its political economy was that of its own era; a very different petition, it will be noticed, from the appealing, cringing petitions sent timidly to Congress by the conservative, truckling labor leaders of later times. The memorial continued;

The remaining laborers are then loaded with additional burdens to provide laws and prisons and standing armies to keep order; expensive wars are created merely to lull for a time the clamors for employment; each new burden aggravates the disease, and national death finally ends it.

The power of capital, was, the memorial read on, "in the nature of things, regulated by the proportion that the numbers of, and competition among, capitalists bears to the number and destitution of laborers." The only sure way of benefiting labor, "and the way best calculated to benefit all classes," was to diminish the destitution among the working classes. And the remedy proposed in the memorial? A settled principle of national policy should be laid down by Congress that the whole of the remaining of the public lands should forever continue to be the public property of the nation "and accordingly, cause them to be laid out from time to time, as the wants of the population might require, in small farms with a suitable proportion of building lots for mechanics, for the free use of any native citizen and his descendants who might be at the expense of clearing them." This policy "would establish a perpetual counterpoise to the absorbing power of capital." The memorial concluded:

These lands have been bought with public money every cent of which is in the end derived from the earnings of the laboring classes.

And while the public money has been liberally employed to protect and foster trade, Government has never, to our knowledge, adopted but one measure (the protective tariff system) with a distinct view to promote the interests of labor; and all of the advantages of this one have been absorbed by the preponderating power of capital. [Footnote: Executive Documents, First Session, Twenty-third Congress, 1834, Doc. No. 104.]