The great labor problem before the Civil War had been that of getting enough laborers and meeting the competition which the abundant free lands of the West had offered. Labor organizations and strikes had been so unusual that public opinion had not yet come to regard them as normal features of society. But the manufacturing development of the sixties in iron and steel, in textiles, and in other machine industries, threw workmen together in increasing number, taught them their interests as a class, and set the scene for an outbreak of strikes when the shops shut down or reduced wages in the depression of the seventies. About 1877 these strikes shocked society by their violence. Neither had the public been educated to the strike itself, nor the labor leaders to that moderation, without which public sympathy cannot be retained or strikes won. A feeling adverse to organized labor swept the country and endangered the existence of the labor movement.
POPULATION AND IMMIGRATION, 1850-1910
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(Table and Diagram based upon Thirteenth Census, 1910, Population,
Vol. 1, pp. 129, 130.)
The Knights of Labor received the heaviest weight of disfavor. This was an industrial union, founded in 1869, embracing labor of all trades, and held together by a secret organization. Dismissal so often followed admitted membership in a union that secrecy was defensible, but secrecy mystified and frightened the public. The policy of secrecy was abandoned in 1882, after the excesses of the "Molly Maguires" had brought discredit upon all organized labor. Under the leadership of Grand Master Workman Powderly the Knights carried on an open and aggressive campaign of education for labor and inspection laws throughout the Union. The American Federation of Labor, founded in 1881 and reorganized in 1886, aided in this general work, and with the Knights helped to reconcile the public to the principle of unionism.
State bureaus of labor appeared in many States as the result of the general agitation. An eight-hour law, for federal employees, had been gained in 1868, while in 1884 a Commissioner of Labor was created in the Department of the Interior. Arthur was urged to give the post to Powderly, but selected instead an economist less actively identified with the propaganda, Carroll D. Wright, under whose direction the Bureau grew steadily in importance. Its reports became quarries for statistical information on the labor problem, and its success justified its incorporation in the new Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903.
The "Army of the Discontented," as Powderly called the workers, demanded education and protective laws, and turned their attention to competition about 1882. The cutting of wages by peasant laborers, newly arrived in America, was a grievance as soon as labor became class-conscious. Opposition to this became virulent in the Far West, where the foreigner was also a Mongolian. The Chinese of the Pacific Slope, more frugal and industrious than Americans, were harried in the early eighties, and violence was done them in many quarters. Garfield had been weakened in 1880 by a forged letter seeming to show that he favored the introduction of more Chinese. So numerous were the persecutors that Congress responded to the demand for a Chinese Exclusion Bill, in spite of the Treaty of 1880, which guaranteed fair treatment. Arthur vetoed the first bill, but accepted a second, less stringent in its terms. After this victory, the labor forces turned upon immigration in general.
No idea had been fixed more firmly in the American mind than that the oppressed of Europe were here to find opportunity. Immigrants had always been welcomed and assimilated, while Congress had, in 1864, organized a bureau to encourage and safeguard immigration. The influx always increased in prosperous, and declined in adverse, years. After 1878 the annual number broke all records. Western railway corporations were inviting immigrants to use their lands, manufacturers called them to the mills, and the total rose from 177,000 in 1879 to 788,000 in 1882. This latter year was the greatest of the century, its newcomers attracting the attention of the press, of the city charities who felt their growing responsibilities, and of the unions who felt their competition. Nearly all the immigrants were producers, a high percentage being able-bodied young men and women. The greatest number came from Great Britain, among whom the Irish settled in the Eastern cities. Next were the Germans, who moved toward Chicago or St. Louis, while the Scandinavians filled up the wheat-lands of the Northwest.
Under the demand of the labor vote, Congress provided, in 1882, for the inspection of immigrants and the deportation of undesirable aliens, and in 1885 it forbade the importation of skilled laborers under contract. As yet the labor movement was largely aristocratic, safeguarding the skilled workmen, but disregarding the common laborers.
The labor and immigration movement in its new aspect widened the field for economic legislation, for few States had factory laws, employers' liability laws, or laws protecting the weak,—the women and the children. It also complicated the situation in politics. The Germans and Scandinavians, settling in centers which had been strongly Unionist in the Civil War, were believed to absorb the doctrines of the Republicans from their compatriots already in America. The Irish were generally Democrats, and the only Republican leader who had a large following among them was Blaine. He had fraternized with the California Irish leader, Dennis Kearney; as Secretary of State he had protected naturalized Irishmen who went home to fight for Home Rule; some of his immediate family were Catholics; and his insistence on an American canal won him friends who were already disposed to hate Great Britain.
The votes of 1876 and 1880 showed that the two parties were nearly even in strength, so that any slight popularity or accident might decide an election. As politicians prepared for 1884 the attitude of naturalized foreigners assumed a new importance which the friends of the various candidates tried to measure. The campaign could not be fought on any of the old issues, but which of the new—civil service, tariff, or labor—was in doubt.