A History of Trade Unionism in the United States

by Selig Perlman

The strikes failed in every case but their moral effect was enormous. The general public still retained a fresh memory of the Commune of Paris of 1871 and feared for the foundations of the established order. The wage earners, on the other hand, felt that the strikers had not been fairly dealt with. It was on this intense labor discontent that the greenback agitation fed and grew.

Whereas in 1876 the greenback labor vote was negligible, notwithstanding the exhortations by many of the former trade union leaders who turned greenback agitators, now, following the great strikes, greenbackism became primarily a labor movement. Local Greenback-Labor parties were being organized everywhere and a national Greenback-Labor party was not far behind in forming. The continued industrial depression was a decisive factor, the winter of 1877-1878 marking perhaps the point of its greatest intensity. Naturally the greenback movement was growing apace. One of the notable successes in the spring of 1878 was the election of Terence V. Powderly, later Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, as mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The Congressional election in the autumn of 1878 marked the zenith of the movement. The aggregate greenback vote cast in the election exceeded a million, and fourteen Representatives were sent to Congress. In New England the movement was strong enough to poll almost a third of the total vote in Maine, over 8 percent of the total vote in both Connecticut and New Hampshire, and from 4 to 6 percent, in the other States. In Maine the greenbackers elected 32 members of the upper house and 151 members of the lower house and one Congressman, Thompson Murch of Rochland, who was secretary of the National Granite Cutters' Union. However, the bulk of the vote in that State was obviously agricultural. In Massachusetts, the situation was dominated by General Benjamin F. Butler, lifelong Republican politician, who had succeeded in getting the Democratic nomination for governor and was endorsed by the Greenback convention. He received a large vote but was defeated for office.

But just as the Greenback-Labor movement was assuming promising proportions a change for the better in the industrial situation cut under the very roots of its existence. In addition, one month after the election of 1878, its principal issue disappeared. January 1, 1879, was the date fixed by the act for resumption of redemption of greenbacks in gold and on December 17, 1878, the premium on gold disappeared. From that day on, the greenback became a dead issue.

Another factor of great importance was the large increase in the volume of the currency. In 1881 the currency, which had averaged about $725,000,000 for the years 1876-1878, reached over $1,111,000,000. Under these conditions, all that remained available to the platform-makers and propagandists of the party was their opposition to the so-called "monopolistic" national banks with their control over currency and to the refunding of the bonded debt of the government.

The disappearance of the financial issue snapped the threads which had held together the farmer and the wage-worker. So long as depression continued, the issue was financial and the two had, as they thought, a common enemy—the banker. The financial issue once settled, or at least suspended, the object of the attack by labor became the employer, and that of the attack by the farmer—the railway corporation and the warehouse man. Prosperity had mitigated the grievances of both classes, but while the farmer still had a great deal to expect from politics in the form of state regulation of railway rates, the wage earners' struggle now turned entirely economic and not political.

In California, as in the Eastern industrial States, the railway strikes of 1877 precipitated a political movement. California had retained gold as currency throughout the entire period of paper money, and the labor movement at no time had accepted the greenback platform. The political issue after 1877 was racial, not financial, and the weapon was not merely the ballot, but also "direct action"—violence. The anti-Chinese agitation in California, culminating as it did in the Exclusion Law passed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most important single factor in the history of American labor, for without it the entire country might have been overrun by Mongolian labor and the labor movement might have become a conflict of races instead of one of classes.[10]

The seventies witnessed another of those recurring attempts of consumers' cooperation already noticed in the forties and sixties. This time the movement was organized by the "Sovereigns of Industry," a secret order, founded at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1874 by one William H. Earle. The spirit of the Order was entirely peaceful and unobtrusive as expressed in the first paragraph of the Declaration of Purposes which reads as follows:

"The Order of the Sovereigns of Industry is an association of the industrial or laboring classes, without regard to race, sex, color, nationality, or occupation; not founded for the purpose of waging any war of aggression upon any other class, or for fostering any antagonism of labor against capital, or of arraying the poor against the rich; but for mutual assistance in self-improvement and self-protection."

The scheme of organization called for a local council including members from the town or district, a state council, comprising representatives from the local councils and a National Council in which the States were represented. The president of the National Council was the founder of the Order, William H. Earle.