The economic and industrial development of the time demanded not only new money and credit but new men. A new type of executive was wanted, and he soon appeared to satisfy the need. Neither a capitalist nor a merchant, he combined in some degree the functions of both, added to them the greater function of industrial manager, and received from great business concerns a high premium for his talent and foresight. This Captain of Industry, as he has been called, is the foremost figure of the period, the hero of the industrial drama.
But much of what is admirable in that generation of nation builders is obscured by the industrial anarchy which prevailed. Everybody was for himself—and the devil was busy harvesting the hindmost. There were “rate-wars,” “cut-rate sales,” secret intrigues, and rebates; and there were subterranean passages—some, indeed, scarcely under the surface—to council chambers, executive mansions, and Congress. There were extreme fluctuations of industry: prosperity was either at a very high level or depression at a very low one. Prosperity would bring on an expansion of credits, a rise in prices, higher cost of living, strikes and boycotts for higher wages; then depression would follow with the shutdown and that most distressing of social diseases, unemployment. During the panic of 1873-74 many thousands of men marched the streets crying earnestly for work.
Between the panics, strikes became a part of the economic routine of the country. They were expected, just as pay days and legal holidays are expected. Now for the first time came strikes that can only be characterized as stupendous. They were not mere slight economic disturbances; they were veritable industrial earthquakes. In 1873 the coal miners of Pennsylvania, resenting the truck system and the miserable housing which the mine owners forced upon them, struck by the tens of thousands. In Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Maryland, Ohio, and New York strikes occurred in all sorts of industries. There were the usual parades and banners, some appealing, some insulting, and all the while the militia guarded property. In July, 1877, the men of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad refused to submit to a fourth reduction in wages in seven years and struck. From Baltimore the resentment spread to Pennsylvania and culminated with riots in Pittsburgh. All the anthracite coal miners struck, followed by most of the bituminous miners of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The militia were impotent to subdue the mobs; Federal troops had to be sent by President Hayes into many of the States; and a proclamation by the President commanded all citizens to keep the peace. Thus was Federal authority introduced to bolster up the administrative weakness of the States, and the first step was taken on the road to industrial nationalization.
The turmoil had hardly subsided when, in 1880, new strikes broke out. In the long catalogue of the strikers of that year are found the ribbon weavers of Philadelphia, Paterson, and New York, the stablemen of New York, New Jersey, and San Francisco, the cotton yard workers of New Orleans, the cotton weavers of New England and New York, the stockyard employees of Chicago and Omaha, the potters of Green Point, Long Island, the puddlers of Johnstown and Columbia, Pennsylvania, the machinists of Buffalo, the tailors of New York, and the shoemakers of Indiana. The year 1882 was scarcely less restive. But 1886 is marked in labor annals as “the year of the great uprising,” when twice as many strikes as in any previous year were reported by the United States Commissioner of Labor, and when these strikes reached a tragic climax in the Chicago Haymarket riots.
It was during this feverish epoch that organized labor first entered the arena of national politics. When the policy as to the national currency became an issue, the lure of cheap money drew labor into an alliance in 1880 with the Greenbackers, whose mad cry added to the general unrest. In this, as in other fatuous pursuits, labor was only responding to the forces and the spirit of the hour. These have been called the years of amalgamation, but they were also the years of tumult, for, while amalgamation was achieved, discipline was not. Authority imposed from within was not sufficient to overcome the decentralizing forces, and just as big business had yet to learn by self-imposed discipline how to overcome the extremely individualistic tendencies which resulted in trade anarchy, so labor had yet to learn through discipline the lessons of self-restraint. Moreover, in the sudden expansion and great enterprises of these days, labor even more than capital lost in stability. One great steadying influence, the old personal relation between master and servant, which prevailed during the days of handicraft and even of the small factory, had disappeared almost completely. Now labor was put up on the market—a heartless term descriptive of a condition from which human beings might be expected to react violently—and they did, for human nature refused to be an inert, marketable thing.
The labor market must expand with the trader’s market. In 1860 there were about one and a third million wage-earners in the United States; in 1870 well over two million; in 1880 nearly two and three-quarters million; and in 1890 over four and a quarter million. The city sucked them in from the country; but by far the larger augmentation came from Europe; and the immigrant, normally optimistic, often untaught, sometimes sullen and filled with a destructive resentment, and always accustomed to low standards of living, added to the armies of labor his vast and complex bulk.
There were two paramount issues—wages and the hours of labor—to which all other issues were and always have been secondary. Wages tend constantly to become inadequate when the standard of living is steadily rising, and they consequently require periodical readjustment. Hours of labor, of course, are not subject in the same degree to external conditions. But the tendency has always been toward a shorter day. In a previous chapter, the inception of the ten-hour movement was outlined. Presently there began the eight-hour movement. As early as 1842 the carpenters and caulkers of the Charleston Navy Yard achieved an eight-hour day; but 1863 may more properly be taken as the beginning of the movement. In this year societies were organized in Boston and its vicinity for the precise purpose of winning the eight-hour day, and soon afterwards a national Eight-Hour League was established with local leagues extending from New England to San Francisco and New Orleans.
This movement received an intelligible philosophy, and so a new vitality, from Ira Steward, a member of the Boston Machinists’ and Blacksmiths’ Union. Writing as a workingman for workingmen, Steward found in the standard of living the true reason for a shorter workday. With beautiful simplicity he pointed out to the laboring man that the shorter period of labor would not mean smaller pay, and to the employer that it would not mean a diminished output. On the contrary, it would be mutually beneficial, for the unwearied workman could produce as much in the shorter day as the wearied workman in the longer. “As long,” Steward wrote, “as tired human hands do most of the world’s hard work, the sentimental pretense of honoring and respecting the horny-handed toiler is as false and absurd as the idea that a solid foundation for a house can be made out of soap bubbles.”
In 1865 Steward’s pamphlet, A Reduction of Hours and Increase of Wages, was widely circulated by the Boston Labor Reform Association. It emphasized the value of leisure and its beneficial reflex effect upon both production and consumption. Gradually these well reasoned and conservatively expressed doctrines found champions such as Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, and Horace Greeley to give them wider publicity and to impress them upon the public consciousness. In 1867 Illinois, Missouri, and New York passed eight-hour laws and Wisconsin declared eight hours a day’s work for women and children. In 1868 Congress established an eight-hour day for public work. These were promising signs, though the battle was still far from being won. The eight-hour day has at last received “the sanction of society”—to use the words of President Wilson in his message to Congress in 1916, when he called for action to avert a great railway strike. But to win that sanction required over half a century of popular agitation, discussion, and economic and political evolution.
Such, in brief, were the general business conditions of the country and the issues which engaged the energies of labor reformers during the period following the Civil War. Meanwhile great changes were made in labor organizations. Many of the old unions were reorganized, and numerous local amalgamations took place. Most of the organizations now took the form of secret societies whose initiations were marked with naïve formalism and whose routines were directed by a group of officers with royal titles and fortified by signs, passwords, and ritual. Some of these orders decorated the faithful with high-sounding degrees. The societies adopted fantastic names such as “The Supreme Mechanical Order of the Sun,” “The Knights of St. Crispin,” and “The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor,” of which more presently.