At first each craft was purely local and disassociated from other trades unions. But comprehending the inadequacy and futility of existing separately, and of acting independently of one another, the unions had some years back begun to weld themselves into one powerful body, covering much of the United States. Each craft union still retained its organization and autonomy, but it now became part of a national organization embracing every form of trades, and centrally officered and led. It was in this way that the workers, step by step, met the organization of capital; the two forces, each representing a conflicting principle, were thus preparing for a series of great industrial battles.
Capital had the wealth, resources and tools of the country; the workers their labor power only. As it stood, it was an uneven contest, with every advantage in favor of capital. The workers could decline to work, but capital could starve them into subjection. These, however, were but the apparent differences. The real and immense difference between them was that capital was in absolute control of the political governing power of the nation, and this power, strange to say, it secured by the votes of the very working class constantly fighting it in the industrial arena. Many years were to elapse before the workers were to realize that they must organize and vote with the same political solidarity that they long had been developing in industrial matters. With political power in their hands the capitalists could, and did, use its whole weight with terrific effect to beat down the working class, and nullify most of the few concessions and laws obtained by the workers after the severest and most self-sacrificing struggles.
One of the first memorable battles between the two hostile forces came about in 1877. In their rate wars the railroad magnates had cut incisively into one another's profits. The permanent gainers were such incipient, or fairly well developed, trusts or combinations as the Standard Oil Company. Now the magnates set about asserting the old capitalist principle of recouping themselves by forcing the workers to make up their losses.
But these deficits were merely relative. Practically every railroad had issued vast amounts of bonds and watered stock, on which fixed charges and dividends had to be paid. Judged by the extent of this inflated stock, the profits of the railroads had certainly decreased. Despite, however, the prevailing cutthroat competition, and the slump in general business following the panic of 1873, the railroads were making large sums on their actual investment, so-called. Most of this investment, it will be recalled, was not private money but was public funds, which were later stolen by corrupt legislation. It was shown before the Hepburn Committee in 1879, as we have noted, that from 1869 the New York Central Railroad had been making sixteen, and perhaps more than twenty per cent., on the actual cost of the road.
Moreover, apart from the profits from ordinary traffic, the railroads were annually fattening on immense sums of public money gathered in by various fraudulent methods. One of these—and is well worth adverting to, for it exists to a greater degree than ever before—was the robbery of the people in the transportation of mails. By a fraudulent official construction, in 1873, of the postal laws, the railroads without cessation have cheated huge sums in falsifying the weight of mail carried, and since that time have charged ten times as much for mail carrying as have the express companies (the profits of which are very great) for equal haulage. But these are simply two phases of the postal plunder. In addition to the regular mail payments, the Government has long paid to the railroad companies an extra allowance of $6,250 a year for the rent of each postal car used, although official investigation has proved that the whole cost of constructing such a car averages but from $2,500 to $5,000. In rent alone, five millions a year have been paid for cars worth, all told, about four millions. From official estimates it would clearly seem that the railroads have long cheated the people out of at least $20,000,000 a year in excess rates—a total of perhaps half a billion dollars since 1873. The Vanderbilt family have been among the chief beneficiaries of this continuous looting. [Footnote: Postmaster General Vilas, Annual Report for 1887:56. In a debate in the United States Senate on February 11, 1905, Senator Pettigrew quoted Postmaster General Wanamaker as saying that "the railroad companies see to it that the representatives in Congress in both branches take care of the interests of the railway people, and that it is practically impossible to procure legislation in the way of reducing expenses.">[ Occasionally the postal officials have made pretences at stopping the plunder, but with no real effect.
THE GREAT STRIKE OF 1877.
Making a loud and plaintive outcry about their declining revenues, some of the railroad systems prepared to assess their fictitious losses upon the workers by cutting down wages. They had already reduced wages to the point of the merest subsistence; and now they decreed that wages must again be curtailed ten cents on every dollar. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, then in the hands of the Garrett family, with a career behind it of consecutive political corruption and fraud, in some ways surpassing that of the Vanderbilts, led in reducing the wages of its workers. The Pennsylvania Railroad followed, and then the Vanderbilts gave the order for another reduction.
At once the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad employees retaliated by declaring a strike; the example was followed by the Pennsylvania men. In order to alienate the sympathy of the general public and to have a pretext for suppressing the strike with armed force, the railroads, it is quite certain, instigated riots at Martinsburg, W. Va., and at Pittsburg. Troops were called out and the so-called mobs were fired on, resulting in a number of strikers being killed and many wounded.
That the railroads deliberately destroyed their own property and then charged the culpability to the strikers, was common report. So conservative an authority as Carroll D. Wright, for a long time United States Commissioner of Labor, tells of the railroad agents setting a large number of old, decayed, worthless freight cars at Pittsburg on fire, and accusing the strikers of the act. He further tells of the Pennsylvania Railroad subsequently extorting millions of dollars from the public treasury on the ground that the destruction of these cars resulted from riot. Wright says that from all that he has been able to gather, he believes the reports of the railroads manufacturing riots to have been true. [Footnote: "The Battles of Labor": 122. In all, the railroad companies secured approximately $22,000,000 from the public treasury in Pennsylvania as indemnity for property destroyed during these "riots." In a subsequent chapter, the corruption of the operation is described.] Vanderbilt acted with greater wisdom than his fellow magnates. Adopting a conciliatory stand, he averted a strike on his lines by restoring the old rate of wages and by other mollifying measures.
He was now assailed from a different direction. The long gathering anger and enmity of the various sections of the middle class against the corporate wealth which had possessed itself of so dictatorial a power, culminated in a manner as instructive as it was ineffective.