Community and Conflict: Working People Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1877-1893

Working-class life was grounded more in group identity than in ideals of individual effort and initiative. Among native-born workers, collective values stemmed from an abiding belief in independence and liberty spawned by the American Revolution, from religious ideals of equality and justice inherent in evangelical Protestantism, and from community institutions. The cooperative values and traditions brought by immigrants arriving throughout the nineteenth century enriched this mix. Many veterans of fierce social conflicts in Europe remained fervent advocates of egalitarian principles after their arrival in the United States.

The social structures and institutions that underlay working-class life in the late nineteenth century nurtured these collective values. Working people particularly forged bonds of solidarity in their neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, women, who generally did not work outside the home after marriage, were crucial to developing these neighborhood ties. Churches, especially the rural African American churches and the urban immigrant Catholic parishes, also fostered local community. But religion could be a source of conflict, as when white Protestant moral reformers sought to reshape the manners and morals of working people. Those reformers viewed another crucial working-class institution—the saloon—with particular horror and launched temperance crusades to close it.

Immigrants relied on collective traditions and identities to help ease their entry into urban-industrial America. Neighborhoods with names such as German Town, Chinatown, and Little Sweden sprang up across the country, each with its own churches, schools, saloons, and newspapers. Ethnic institutions—foreign-language newspapers, athletic and cultural associations, financial institutions, neighborhood militias, and family-oriented beer halls—helped to soften the worst effects of individual isolation in a new land.

African American neighborhoods, like those of white workers, nurtured solidarity, protest, and resistance. In Washington, Atlanta, and other southern cities, a segregated Black culture of mutual aid and self-help eased the afflictions of daily life in a racist society. African Americans fared better—within the severe limitations placed on every aspect of their lives—in large cities, where they could at least secure menial jobs and some small measure of personal freedom.

Working people’s neighborhoods nourished collectivity in part because their homes lacked space for socializing. Developers of housing near factories squeezed cheap tenements and wood-frame houses tightly together. In dark apartments, families and boarders shared beds and slept on couches, chairs, and floors. Residents lacked privacy and sought escape on the city streets. Crowds celebrated holidays, neighbors exchanged news and gossip, and activists debated politics, while peddlers sold food and clothing. Mothers socialized on front steps and porches, and children played in streets and alleys.

Immigrant neighborhoods developed an abundant cultural and institutional life. As newcomers arrived, they sought out relatives or people from their villages in the old country. They found housing through the people they worked with and jobs through the people they lived with. Boarding with families from their homelands, they could eat familiar foods, speak their own languages, and discuss their working conditions free from surveillance. Reformers looked askance at the crowding, but revenue from boarders was an essential part of the family economy. An immigrant woman who cooked for four boarders later recalled “that everybody used to do it [at] that time,” since “some of the people that came from the other side didn’t have no place to stay.”

Neighborhood grocery stores, butcher shops, boardinghouses, churches, and saloons sprang up to meet the needs and tastes of particular ethnic groups, serving as centers of information and communication, connecting neighborhoods with the outside world. In the 1880s, many Czech immigrants to Omaha settled in what became known as “Bohemian Town” or “Praha” (Prague), which was the home to St. Wenceslaus Church, Swoboda’s Bakery, Cermak’s Pharmacy, and the Bohemian Benevolent Association. But such ethnic labels sometimes hid the mixed and rapid changing nature of immigrant working-class neighborhoods.

In working-class neighborhoods in cities such as Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, immigrants supported ethnic fraternal organizations—the Sons of Italy, the Polish Union, and the Jewish Landsmanschaft organizations—to provide mutual assistance and a familiar cultural milieu. They published newspapers and magazines in dozens of languages, filled with news from the old country and advice to newcomers. Immigrants also created cultural activities, sports teams, and clubs. These institutions nourished a sense of sociability and camaraderie and helped sick, injured, or unemployed community residents.

Networks based on extended families and Old World village ties met many of the immediate needs of immigrant workers, but some problems demanded a broader sense of identity. Antonio Margano, an Italian Protestant engaged in missionary work for his church, complained that New York Italians were “divided into almost as many groups as there are sections of Italy represented” and that “while a man may be known as Italian, he is far better known as a Napoletano, Calabrese, Veneziano, Abruzzese, or Siciliano.” But he also observed that the rise of institutions such as Columbus Hospital, the Italian Benevolent Institute, and the Italian Chamber of Commerce pointed to the “development of a larger spirit of co-operation among Italians as a whole.” “Italians” and “Germans” were in this sense being invented in America during the same decades when they were created in Europe through political unification.

Immigrant entrepreneurs turned their native languages and knowledge of Old World preferences into business assets. Many acted as intermediaries for individuals dealing with the American legal and financial systems, explaining, translating, and writing letters for a fee. Working-class neighborhoods in cities and small towns provided ready customers for groceries, saloons, barbershops, and variety stores. Although most of the men and women who ran such businesses managed to establish only small, struggling enterprises, the lure of being one’s own boss attracted the hopeful.

Like industrial tycoons, some small businesspeople believed that the individual pursuit of wealth was the highest realization of American freedoms. But even the most ambitious local politicians and shopkeepers found that to succeed, they had to collaborate with their families, workmates, and other members of their ethnic and religious groups. Many business owners and professionals who relied on working-class patrons for their livelihoods supported working people’s demands and struggles. Local shopkeepers helped strikers by providing food and other necessities on credit.

Similarly, the proprietors of general stores at rural crossroads saw many a farm community through a bad harvest. And although rural “neighborhoods” were not as densely populated as urban ones, they too fostered collective problem solving and socializing. During the 1870s, for example, locusts and drought prompted Kansas women to mount a relief campaign for “families in the country whose only safety from starvation lies in the charity of the people.”

The life of William Turner, a skilled ironmolder who in 1880 lived in Troy, New York, with his wife and eight children, illustrates the nature of individual success within the extended family networks and the ethnic, religious, and labor organizations of the late-nineteenth-century neighborhood. Turner emigrated from Ireland in 1850. His father worked as an unskilled laborer at the Albany Iron Works, and by 1860, William and two of his brothers had jobs there as well. The Turners’ life revolved around work in the mill—six twelve-hour days per week—and time with the family. William soon became a skilled ironworker. When he married, he found a home in the same row of brick houses where his parents lived.

Turner’s rise to the more secure and comfortable position of a skilled worker was the modest success story experienced by millions of Americans—not the “rags to riches” of mythology. Men like Turner dreamed not of riches, but of making a decent life for their families. They found security and solidarity in their ethnic communities, performing the rituals and observing the commandments of their churches and fulfilling their obligations to neighbors and fellow workers.

Women were central to these working–class communities. Unlike factory workers, women working at home could vary their tasks, laying aside their sewing to stir the soup or comfort a crying baby. For these women, labor was intertwined with family-centered entertainment and neighborhood socializing. They often did certain tasks together while chatting about community events, politics, friends and relations, recipes, and housework techniques. But even running modest households required arduous manual labor and considerable time.

More isolated rural women lacked the connections to church, kin, and friends that had sustained them in the more densely populated regions from which they had come, and many women complained of intense loneliness. “As soon as the storms let up, the men could get away from the isolation,” wrote Mari Sandoz, the daughter of a Nebraska homesteader. “But not their women. They had only the wind and the cold and the problems of clothing, shelter, food, and fuel.” But rural women’s work could have a cooperative dimension. Women helped each other to make quilts, as men shared work to get the harvest in and build houses or barns. Groups of women cooked for the parties associated with both of these kinds of cooperative labor, which featured food, music, and dancing after the work was done.

Before the 1890s, most households were equipped with the same technology that had been used for centuries, with two important exceptions: sewing machines and cast-iron stoves. Sewing machines were quite expensive, but marketed on the installment plan, they became a fixture in both middle-class and poorer households. In many households, men’s clothing was purchased, but most women had to produce much of their own clothing and all of their children’s, in addition to family linens.

Cast-iron stoves had become common among the middle class in 1870 and spread to people of all classes by 1890. Stoves heated rooms more evenly than did old-fashioned fireplaces. They allowed finer adjustments in cooking temperatures, and cooks no longer had to bend down by open flames to move pots on the hearth. Nevertheless, the stoves were heated by coal and wood, so most women still had to haul fuel and build fires for all of their cooking and heating. Other regular household tasks included hauling pails of water from outside wells and from pumps connected to city water systems, lugging tubs of hot water from the stove for laundry and dishes, and carrying dirty water and bodily wastes back outside.

In some homes, domestic servants did these tasks for pay; this work was the largest source of paid employment for women in the late nineteenth century. In northern cities, most domestic servants were first-generation Irish. Theirs was a life of drudgery and isolation; it was hard, one Irish maid said, “to give up your whole life to somebody else’s orders.” In the South, domestics were African American women, who rarely had other options and worked for extremely low wages. But domestic servants were not common in workers’ homes; most working people hired household help only in emergencies.

Many women earned money by adding to their household workloads—caring for boarders or taking in laundry or sewing. In western mining towns, women rented or bought large houses and took in workingmen who needed lodgings. One Nevada widow, Mary Mathews, labored until one o’clock every morning to support herself and her small child during the 1870s, running a school, sewing, and taking in laundry. Eventually, she bought a boarding house, where she washed clothes for twenty-six boarders. Many African American married women earned money taking in laundry, which offered considerably more independence than domestic service in white people’s houses. These workers sometimes fought to maintain their autonomy, which was especially precious to people who had memories of slavery.

Of the many institutions that supported community life in working people’s neighborhoods, churches were the most important. Most Americans before the Civil War had been Protestants, but many new immigrants were Catholic and Jewish. Still, in 1890, Protestant denominations claimed more than six of every ten church members. All across the country, rural Protestant churches continued to flourish; countless small, often poor, churches sustained and were sustained by the vast majority of the nation’s farmers, Black and white.

Churches figured centrally in rural African American culture. In Edgefield County, South Carolina, an area that was renowned for lynchings, Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers joined some forty small churches established by Alexander Bettis, a leader who urged African Americans to organize their own institutions. The churches engendered Masonic lodges, benevolent societies, burial organizations, and schools, as well as fairs and other social gatherings. This cultural foundation sustained Black Americans in “Bloody Edgefield.” Many white southerners viewed the networks of Black churches and organizations as a threat. “The meanest negroes in the country are those who are members of the churches,” declared a writer in the North Georgia Citizen in 1879, “and, as a general thing, the more devout and officious they are, the more closely they need watching.”

Churches also created community in mining camps and cattle towns. Kansans exaggerated when they proclaimed in the 1870s that there was “no Sunday west of Junction City and no God west of Salina.” Protestants sent missionaries west to preach against Mormons, Catholics, and moral decay. Western towns built schools first, but these often served as places of worship on Sunday, uniting different Protestant sects. Josiah Strong, a well-known reformer who began as a young minister in Wyoming, observed that western church meetings brought strangers together as Christians. His church spawned a library, a park, and voluntary organizations that battled liquor and prostitution.

In eastern cities, middle- and upper-class Protestants had moved to the suburbs and abandoned many downtown churches in neighborhoods that were now filled with immigrants. As a result, white Protestant churches lost touch with urban working people and became more oriented toward the well-to-do. Wealthy congregations produced nationally renowned ministers, such as Brooklyn’s Henry Ward Beecher, one of the best-known and most influential of these “princes of the pulpit.” Beecher’s wit and eloquence made him a popular speaker, despite much publicity about his alleged extramarital affairs. Although he had supported the antislavery movement, he viewed the rich with sympathy and the poor with hostility. “No man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault—unless it be his sin,” Beecher proclaimed.

Nevertheless, a focus on “sin” could lead to broader concerns. Many women started out in church-based antidrink organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and then began to take a broader view of the need for social reform. And the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Salvation Army did try to bring Protestantism to urban working people. The Salvation Army, an evangelical organization run along military lines, held meetings in the worst slums, even in saloons, and offered “degenerate souls” food, shelter, and low-wage work. The YMCA established gymnasiums, lecture halls, and reading rooms in cities to provide a “wholesome” atmosphere where men could exercise and socialize without the drinking and gambling that prevailed at pool halls, bowling alleys, and saloons. Bible study classes were central to the program. But the predominantly Catholic urban working class did not always warmly receive missionary work of the Protestant YMCA and Salvation Army.

The YMCA had close ties to the social purity movement, which rejected overt sexual expression and practice. In 1873, Anthony Comstock, a dry goods salesman, YMCA member, and founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, won passage of an antiobscenity statute (the so-called Comstock Act), which forbade the mailing of obscene, lewd, lascivious, and indecent writing or advertisements as well as contraceptive devices. As an unpaid postal inspector, Comstock personally supervised forty-seven arrests and the destruction of more than twenty-nine thousand photos, leaflets, songs, and contraceptives in 1875 alone. The literature targeted by the law included material on women’s reproductive health and descriptions of methods of contraception. Comstock’s crusade criminalized social and sexual behavior that deviated from an idealized norm of sobriety, heterosexual monogamy, and piety.

The predominantly urban and working class Catholic Church took much less interest in the social purity movement than did its Protestant counterparts. It had expanded with the influx of poor Irish and German immigrants in the decades before the Civil War and continued to gain strength as Italians and Poles entered the country after 1880. Parochial schools provided Catholics with educational opportunities that extended through college, and large city parishes offered programs to meet their spiritual, recreational, and charitable needs. The church’s hierarchy remained extremely conservative on social issues, as was illustrated by the policy of excommunicating members who were active in socialist organizations. But at the local parish level, priests defended the aspirations of their working-class parishioners.

The saloon was another central institution of working-class culture; one writer called it “the one democratic club in American life.” Drinking on the job, prevalent early in the nineteenth century, had generally disappeared by the 1870s. With a shorter workday—usually ten hours for skilled workers—men drank during leisure hours, in popular taverns that were usually located across the street from a factory or down the road from a mine. “Watch the ‘dinner pail’ brigade,” a Worcester, Massachusetts, observer noted in 1891, “and see how many men and boys drop into the saloons along the north end of Main Street.”

Saloons filled tangible needs. Saloon owners cashed workers’ checks and lent them money. The beer they served was considered full of nutrients and healthier than the water in working-class neighborhoods, which was drawn from wells and pumps near overused outhouses. Many workingmen ate their meals at saloons. “It is cheaper to live at the barroom than at the poor beaneries,” an unemployed Boston man reported in 1889. A visitor to a New Orleans saloon described “a large table . . . [with] trays of cut bread, bowls of butter, salads, and sauces” and “another table . . . [with] a large tureen of soup, a platter of roast beef, a large dish of rice or baked beans.”

At the saloon, workingmen could experience mutuality and collectivity, symbolized by “treating”—buying rounds of drinks. They could read newspapers, pick up job leads, enjoy good fellowship, and escape from overcrowded houses and tenements. Popular entertainments—illegal boxing matches, cockfights, and gambling—enlivened the atmosphere. Trade unions and ethnic organizations that lacked their own facilities met in saloons, and local politicians set up unofficial headquarters at the bar, dispensing favors and buying drinks for “the boys.” Many saloonkeepers entered local politics; eleven of twenty-four New York City Aldermen ran saloons in 1890.

Except for German family establishments that served beer, most saloons catered only to men. Women who drank generally did so at home. In some places, police regulations aimed at curbing prostitution forbade women from entering barrooms. Even when not legally excluded, women who considered themselves respectable did not go to saloons, so they were effectively prohibited from joining organizations that met there.

Many wealthy people—who did their own drinking at private clubs, at expensive hotels, and at home—crusaded to close saloons. Some of the hardest-fought political battles of the nineteenth century involved efforts to limit drinking. Factory owners led campaigns against licensing individual establishments in an effort to keep their workers sober. They contended that temperance increased efficiency: “the men earn better wages, lose less time, do better work . . . while the relations between employers and workmen are most harmonious.” Other temperance crusaders were motivated by religious convictions, a concern about the political threat posed by the independent saloon culture, a distaste for or fear of the (often Catholic) immigrants who gathered at saloons, or a sincere conviction that drinking was the source of working-class poverty.

Indeed, alcohol and alcoholism could create real problems in working-class families. Therefore, labor reformers, too, decried the debilitating consequences of drink and argued that workers who criticized wage dependency should also shun alcohol dependency. Some unions actively promoted temperance, although it often seemed a losing cause. One prominent labor leader, implored workers to “throw strong drink aside as you would an ounce of liquid hell.”

Women temperance leaders organized marches on saloons to pray, sing hymns, implore drinkers to pledge abstinence, and shame proprietors. One such group of women, successful in ending the local liquor trade in an Ohio county, formed the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1874. Politicizing farm women and women from “respectable” Protestant working-class families, the WCTU recognized the connection between alcoholism and social issues. In the 1890s, it argued that poverty created drinking problems, reversing an earlier stand that excessive drinking caused poverty. The WCTU worked to improve the conditions of the working class, sought power for women inside the home, and endorsed woman suffrage in 1882, decades before any other national group. Its motto, “Do Everything,” encouraged women activists to embrace a wide range of social legislation. The WCTU eventually became the largest American women’s organization ever.

As the social and economic gulf separating wage earners and their employers widened, a labor movement of astonishing breadth emerged in the 1880s. Recognizing common interests, workers began to unionize to contest poor working conditions and assert their rights. Labor organization was rooted in the local neighborhoods, institutions, churches, and ethnic societies that structured everyday life for working people.

Despite this pervasive localism, one national labor organization—the Knights of Labor—arose in the 1880s to powerfully challenge the national corporations that increasingly held sway in late-nineteenth-century America. The Knights mobilized unprecedented numbers and won some stunning victories. They fed into a more general “great uprising of labor,” which led into nationwide strikes—many of them successful—for shorter workdays. Ultimately, however, an employer counteroffensive that began in the aftermath of the Haymarket bombing of 1886 and had the support of the coercive power of the state halted this onward march of labor by the end of the 1880s.

With the exception of the Knights of Labor, most unions were local and confined to an individual trade. Cincinnati, an important manufacturing center, boasted thirty-five separate unions in the early 1880s. Here, as elsewhere, most union members were skilled craftsmen in the building trades, foundries, and small consumer-goods industries.

Craft unionists created strong central labor bodies in cities all across the country, from Boston to Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, and San Francisco. In 1882, New York City’s Central Labor Union (CLU) brought together a dozen small unions. Within a few years, it functioned as an effective “parliament of labor” for more than two hundred labor organizations. As one printer put it, the CLU constituted an effort to replace the “little-minded, narrow-minded view of the interests of a single occupation” with that of “the general interests of all bodies of wage workers.”

Traditional ideas about gender roles and masculinity infused craft unionism. “The craftsmen’s ethical code,” notes one labor historian, “demanded a ‘manly’ bearing toward the boss,” and “few words enjoyed more popularity in the nineteenth century than this honorific, with all its connotations of dignity, respectability, defiant egalitarianism, and patriarchal male supremacy.” Women were barred from most skilled occupations, but unions were hostile even to the women who customarily worked alongside men, as in the cigar industry. Focusing narrowly on “bread and butter” wage goals, craft unions fought for the “family wage” to enable men to support their families “in a manner consistent with their responsibilities as husbands, fathers, men, and citizens.” Though the demand for a family wage dignified male workers’ struggles at the expense of women’s, the two were not entirely separable; higher wages paid to fathers and husbands would benefit most working women.

Although craft unions evinced little interest in women workers, some women organized on their own. During the summer of 1881, African American washerwomen in Atlanta organized a two-week strike, demanding higher fees and recruiting 3,000 supporters by door-to-door canvassing and nightly neighborhood meetings throughout the city. This protest was unusual but not unique. Following the 1877 railroad strike, household workers in Galveston, Texas, had walked off their jobs, and other southern domestics struck from time to time, often led by outspoken washerwomen. More often, however, household workers and independent washerwomen used covert tactics—such as quitting without notice—to resist racism and oppression.

The labor movement offered workers good fellowship and activities that reinforced a working-class-consciousness. Unions and their citywide central organizations sponsored social activities: parades, balls, and picnics. More broadly, labor organizations were part of an alternative culture that belonged unmistakably to the producing classes. Many cities had labor reading rooms; Atlanta’s Union Hall and Library Association drew 800 people a week during the mid-1880s to read its collection of over 350 newspapers. In Detroit, the labor movement supported a range of daily activities. Workers gathered to read prolabor newspapers in English and German; to argue politics; and to participate in theater groups, singing societies, dances, and educational events. Some joined the Detroit Rifles, a militia that drilled and practiced target shooting on the outskirts of town under cover of darkness. “Every union ought to have its company of sharpshooters,” a Detroit worker wrote the Labor Leaf. He urged his compatriots to pick up the gun and “learn to preserve your rights in the same way your forefathers did.”

Besides daily fellowship, the labor community offered a spiritual experience of solidarity, a new form of evangelism based on old ideals: the brotherhood of man, divine retribution against injustice, and indignation at human suffering. The labor movement adapted these religious ideals and used spiritual language to reflect and interpret the growing class division. Labor songs drew on hymns, changing the words but not their zealous spirit. Unions, the United Mine Workers’ Journal suggested, had stepped into the space left when the conservative churches abdicated their true mission. “Jesus Christ is with us outside the church,” one worker explained, “and we shall prevail with God.”

Righteous belief and a context of community provided the foundation for a wave of boycotts in the mid-1880s. Boycotts, an effort to win concessions from an employer by persuading other workers to stop patronizing the employer’s business, proved especially effective in trades serving urban working-class consumers. One business journal reported more than two hundred boycotts in 1884 and 1885—against newspapers, street railways, and manufacturers of cigars, hats, carpets, clothing, shoes, and brooms. The movement hit its peak in 1886, when countless campaigns touched the South, Far West, Midwest, and eastern seaboard. Denouncing boycotts as “un-American and anti-American,” employers turned to the courts. In the spring of 1886, New York courts prohibited boycotts as a form of criminal conspiracy, handing down indictments against more than 100 tailors, bakers, musicians, and waiters. In the most widely publicized of the subsequent trials, five workers who had organized a boycott against Theiss’ Music Hall received long prison terms.

The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, a group founded by nine Philadelphia tailors in 1869, stood at the center of labor activity in the 1880s. In response to employers’ use of firings and blacklists to suppress unions, the Knights adopted rigid secrecy for members. Its first leader, Uriah Stephens, had studied for the ministry before apprenticing as a tailor. A man of broad moral vision, he called for an organization that would unite all workers, regardless of race, nationality, occupation, or skill level.

In 1879, the Knights of Labor chose Terence V. Powderly as their “Grand Master Workman.” An Irish Catholic machinist and mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Powderly led the Knights for fifteen years. The Order’s programs reflected not only Powderly’s beliefs in temperance, education, and land reform, but also his conviction that the wage system should be abolished. Under his leadership, the Knights gradually put aside their secrecy, which had hampered their ability to grow, and membership soared.

Under Powderly, the Knights became a stunningly influential national movement composed of hundreds of different local assemblies. Its diversity makes it difficult to generalize about its approaches and policies. For example, although leaders such as Powderly officially opposed strikes and favored good relations with “fair” employers, its members joined and led dozens of work stoppages. And while it preferred “industrial” forms of unionism—that is, organizing all workers regardless of skill—it had locals that were essentially craft-based unions.

In general terms, however, the Knights stood for the twin concepts of “republicanism” and “producerism” that linked the belief in government determined by the people with production determined by the workers. “We declare an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage system of labor and republican system of government,” they proclaimed. They sought to eliminate both political corruption and the wage system and, thereby, restore independence to American citizens.

With this commitment to republicanism went a deep faith in the “producing classes.” If properly mobilized, the Knights believed, this broad social group producing society’s wealth—the workers, the farmers, even the honest manufacturers—could rescue America from the hands of monopolists and other social parasites. The Knights excluded “non-producers,” such as bankers, speculators, lawyers, and liquor dealers, from their ranks. But they admitted “fair” employers, who respected the “dignity of labor” by employing union workers and selling union-made goods.

Drastic wage cuts accompanying the economic downturn of the early 1880s gave the organization its greatest impetus for growth. Victories against two of the country’s most powerful railroads—the giant Union Pacific and financier Jay Gould’s Southwestern—brought workers across the nation into the Knights. In the first walkout, they won the restoration of the wage cuts, and in the second, they won an agreement not to discriminate against union members in employment. The victory over Gould, one of the most hated men in America, astonished the nation and brought tens of thousands of new members into the Knights. In Milwaukee, where German American craftsmen had dominated the Order in the early 1880s, less-skilled Polish immigrants streamed into the organization in 1886; nearly a thousand joined on a single day. By 1886, the Order boasted fifteen thousand local assemblies, representing between 700,000 and one million members—nearly 10 percent of the country’s nonagricultural workforce. Never had such a great proportion enrolled in unions, although, of course, most workers remained outside the union movement even during this great uprising of labor.

The Knights’ commitment to equality extended beyond healing the split between skilled and unskilled workers and included women, immigrants, Mexican Americans, and African Americans, all previously shut out of the labor movement. The Knights welcomed African Americans from the beginning. Most joined all-Black assemblies, but some locals had mixed membership, even in the South. Black dockworkers in New Orleans, turpentine workers in Mississippi, tobacco factory workers in Virginia, and coal miners in Alabama, West Virginia, and Tennessee all joined the Knights in the first half of the 1880s. African American workers became the mainstays of many fledgling local assemblies. “The colored people of the South are flocking to us,” trumpeted one Knights organizer.

In Fort Worth, Texas, the Knights united European American, African American, and Mexican American workers in the first coalition of its kind in state history. The Central Trades and Labor Assembly in New Orleans represented some 10,000 Black and white workers who regularly joined forces in demonstrations and parades. “In view of the prejudice that existed a few years ago against the negro race,” a Brooklyn Knight wrote, “who would have thought that negroes could ever be admitted into a labor organization on an equal footing with white men?”

The Order’s practice of organizing separate Black assemblies provoked controversy among African Americans. Some criticized the labor movement’s continuing racism, particularly its exclusion of African Americans from skilled trades. A North Carolina mason complained, “The white Knights of Labor prevent me from getting employment because I am a colored man, although I belong to the same organization.” But other Black leaders believed that the Order’s local and national assemblies represented a significant advance, providing a context in which Black and white workers could begin to make common cause.

The emergence of the Knights of Labor also moved Irish immigrants to the center of the American labor movement. Irish activism had begun with support for the Land League, an organization of tenant farmers in Ireland that built an enormous following in the late 1870s. In the early years, Powderly claimed, the American labor movement and the Irish land movement were “almost identical,” and secret gatherings of the Knights frequently followed public meetings of the Land League. As Patrick Ford, a New York editor, explained, “The cause of the poor in Donegal [Ireland] is the cause of the factory slave in Fall River [Massachusetts].”

Unlike African Americans and Irish immigrants, women had to fight their way into the Knights of Labor. Leaders of the Order spoke vaguely about “equal rights” and embraced the idea of equal pay for women, but equal pay meant little in a gender-segregated workforce. The Knights stopped short of granting membership to women, and Powderly refused to implement a resolution calling for women to be admitted until rules “for the governing of assemblies of women” were prepared. Then Mary Stirling, who had led a successful strike of “lady shoemakers” in Philadelphia, presented herself as a delegate at the Knights’ convention in 1881. Forced to take a stand, Powderly finally declared that “women should be admitted on equality with men.” Within a few years, one in ten Knights was a woman.

The Knights of Labor provided an unprecedented opportunity for working-class women to join men in the struggle for better lives. The Knights mobilized support for equal pay for women, equal rights for women within all organizations, and respect for women’s work, whether unpaid in the home or for wages in the factory or mill. The Order’s eclectic reform vision linked women’s industrial and domestic concerns to broad social and political issues, giving rise to a kind of “labor feminism” in the 1880s.

The Knights of Labor, did, however, blatantly discriminate against one group: the Chinese. In the early 1880s, the major focus of the Order’s political activity was promoting the Chinese Exclusion Act, which closed the nation’s gates to Chinese immigrants. The Knights hailed the law as a step forward for “American” workers. Especially on the West Coast, Chinese workers served as convenient scapegoats during hard times.

This persistent racism undercut the Knights proclaimed commitment to ideals of mutuality and solidarity. Although unwilling to embrace solidarity with Chinese immigrants, the Knights did develop a variety of local institutions that fostered cooperation and mutuality among its members. Many locals maintained cooperative stores on the ground floors of their halls and assembly rooms above, where members could hear labor sermons, read reform papers, or debate politics and economics. Knights also found group expression in balls, picnics, and parades.

The groups that made up the Knights of Labor never achieved total harmony, but for a time, the alliance had enough power and stability to spark widespread fear among industrialists and their friends. During a Cleveland steel strike, employers called on police to intervene. After violent confrontations at the mill gates, the city’s daily newspapers launched a torrent of invective against the “un-American” Polish workers, labeling them “foreign devils,” “ignorant and degraded whelps,” and “Communistic scoundrels.” But many members of the Knights reveled in the solidarity. “All I knew then of the principles of the Knights of Labor,” the Jewish immigrant Abraham Bisno later remembered, “was that the motto . . . was One for All, and All for One."

“The year 1886 will be known as the year of the great uprising of labor,” proclaimed George McNeill, a Massachusetts member of the Knights of Labor. “The skilled and the unskilled, the high-paid and the low-paid all joined hands.” The Knights’ membership drive and the boycott movement peaked that year. Even more important, hundreds of thousands of workers struck, demonstrated, and fought for an eight-hour day.

American workers had been agitating for shorter workdays for decades. In 1884, the demand resurfaced when the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions began a two-year campaign, resolving that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s work from and after May 1, 1886” and calling for a nationwide strike to begin that day. Local unionists who called for national organizing to deal with employers operating in national markets formed the federation, an alliance of eighteen national unions, in 1881. At its peak in 1886, federation membership totaled as much as 350,000, or 3 percent of the nation’s nonagricultural workforce.

From Milwaukee, Chicago, and New York, the eight-hour movement spread to towns and cities throughout the country. “This is the workingman’s hour,” proclaimed the workers at Boston’s Faneuil Hall on the eve of May 1, 1886. Across the nation, about one-third of a million workers demonstrated for the eight-hour day, and 200,000 actually went out on strike. By the end of the year, 400,000 workers had participated in 1,500 strikes, more than in any previous year of American history. Most of the strikers won shorter workdays, and 42,000 won an eight-hour day. These strikes marked an important new phase in the mobilization of unskilled workers, brought many workers into the ranks of the labor movement, and turned thousands of union members into activists.

The national leadership of the Knights of Labor discouraged the demonstrations and strikes for the eight-hour day, but many Knights led local campaigns, working with the unions and with the socialists and anarchists who played a prominent role in the agitation. Although united in their challenge to the concept of private property, socialists and anarchists differed in their views of the role of government. Socialists advocated government ownership of factories and mines, whereas anarchists argued that organized government was by its very nature oppressive.

In Chicago, radicals, most notably Albert Parsons, led the eight-hour movement. The son of a prominent white New England family, Parsons arrived in Chicago after apprenticing as a printer in Waco, Texas, where he had moved before the Civil War. Although he had served in the Confederate Army, Parsons became a Radical Republican during Reconstruction, championing African American rights, addressing meetings, and mobilizing Black voters. He met his wife Lucy when she was sixteen and already a passionate labor and antiracist activist. Lucy had probably been born into slavery in Texas, but she claimed to be the orphaned child of Mexican and Native American parents. Because Texas laws banned interracial marriage, they moved north in 1873, settling in Chicago, where Albert found employment as a typesetter.

Making contacts among Chicago radicals and hosting socialist study groups in their home, Lucy and Albert Parsons were soon at the center of socialist and anarchist agitation. When Albert lost his job because of speeches he gave during the 1877 railroad strike, Lucy set up a dressmaking shop to support them both. By 1885, as the most famous radical couple in Chicago, they faced regular and vicious attacks in the mainstream press.

On May 1, 1886, Parsons led the 80,000 Chicago marchers in a parade for the eight-hour day. The day passed without incident, but two days later, a clash at the McCormick Reaper Works ended in police beatings and the fatal shooting of two unarmed workers. August Spies, the editor of a prolabor German newspaper witnessed the bloodshed and issued a fiery leaflet, calling Chicago’s workers to a protest at Haymarket Square the following evening. Attendance was sparse at the hastily called rally. As the small crowd began to drift away, a bomb exploded, killing a policeman. The police opened fire immediately, killing at least one more person and wounding many more.

The city’s antiradical, anti-immigrant civic leaders quickly sought revenge for the policeman’s death. Parsons, Spies, and six other anarchist leaders were arrested, charged with conspiracy to commit murder, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. No evidence ever connected any of the accused with the bomb. Even so, Powderly refused to support Parsons, a member of the Knights, or to criticize the courts. Despite worldwide protest, Spies, Parsons, and two of their comrades went to the gallows in November 1887. One of the remaining anarchists committed suicide. John Peter Altgeld, a German immigrant who had by then become the prolabor governor of Illinois, pardoned the three others in 1893.

What determines whether political speech is protected by the First Amendment?

Haymarket raised fears among the middle and upper classes—anxiety about aliens, radicals, mobs, and labor organizations and, more broadly, about the prospects for anarchism and revolution. Government responded to these fears by strengthening the police, militia, and the U.S. Army, and vigilante groups proliferated. Capitalists mounted a sustained counteroffensive to destroy the insurgency of the eight-hour movement and other organized labor efforts. Some employers attempted to undercut unionization by hiring workers from different ethnic groups who would have difficulty communicating with one another. Trade association members discharged strikers, locked out workers who joined unions, and circulated blacklists of labor activists. Industrial spies, many of them employees of the rapidly growing Pinkerton Detective Agency, infiltrated labor organizations.

            Employers also relied increasingly on the coercive power of the government. During the 1880s, legal charges such as “inciting to riot,” “obstructing the streets,” “intimidation,” and “trespass” were first used extensively against strikers, and court injunctions restricting workers’ right to picket became commonplace. One judge, handing down an injunction in a labor dispute, proudly called it a “Gatling [machine] gun on paper.”

Weakened by internal disputes, faulty decisions, and disunity of purpose, the Knights of Labor proved especially vulnerable. The most dramatic setback occurred on the same rail lines where the Knights had first become prominent. After a successful strike in 1885, Southwestern Railroad workers struck again in March 1886, demanding wage increases and the reinstatement of a discharged comrade. But railroad executives, realizing that placating workers’ organizations fostered militancy and unionization, took a hard line. In the midst of the eight-hour strikes, the Knights capitulated on May 4, 1886, and called off the walkout.

Across the country, employers who had negotiated with labor in 1884 and 1885 refused to do so in 1886. The Illinois Bureau of Labor reported that of seventy-six attempts to negotiate differences between labor and employers in that year, employers rejected any discussion in thirty-two cases. In the second half of 1886, employers locked out some 100,000 workers. Attempts to improve working conditions—by laundry workers in Troy, New York; packinghouse workers in Chicago; and knitters in Cohoes and Amsterdam, New York—ended in harsh defeats.

All these unsuccessful strikes involved the Knights of Labor, which collapsed, no longer able to protect members’ workplace rights. Across the nation, the organization that had boasted perhaps three quarters of a million members at its peak in 1886 had shrunk to half that size within a year. By 1890, the Knights could claim only 100,000 members.

The decline of the Knights did not, however, mean the end of the working-class challenge to the industrial capitalist order. Working people also mobilized in other arenas and through other organizations in the 1880s and early 1890s. They sought political power, for example, through the mainstream parties and their own labor parties, winning both patronage jobs and some modest legislative gains. Skilled workers mobilized through the American Federation of Labor, which emerged as the dominant labor organization of that era (and subsequent ones as well).

Although the AFL had a narrower social and political vision than the Knights, it proved more adept in winning strikes and making gains for members. The AFL sometimes moved beyond advocating the self-interests of its members, although it never transcended the racism that pervaded American society at this time. The United Mine Workers, however, provided a shining exception and organized coal miners across racial lines. The class struggles that marked urban industrial workplaces also spilled over into the countryside. Across the nation, groups of workers and small farmers struggled against the power of the railroads and the giant corporations. They won some remarkable victories, but as the defeat of steelworkers at Homestead in 1892 indicated, the greater power remained in the hands of the capitalists.

For much of the nineteenth century, an abiding belief in equality and independence permeated working-class political thought. The Revolutionary-era ideology of republicanism placed on an equal and fair footing all white men who participated in American political and social life. In fact, many election boards required ownership of property in order to vote, but republicanism rested on the assumption that independent producers had skills or access to farmland and could provide adequately for themselves and their families. Women remained outside the bounds of formal political participation, as, in practice, did African Americans, Native Americans, and most immigrants. Still, the rhetoric of mainstream American politics promoted the idea that fairness and equal opportunity marked the difference between the United States and the privilege-bound Old World.

By the 1870s, this republican vision of a society of independent citizens was further tarnished. The railroad strikes of 1877 indicated how far the republic had traveled from the egalitarian promise of the eighteenth century; an ugly chasm divided the broad mass of working people from the wealth and political power of industrial capitalists. To Gilded Age labor reformers, the debasement of politics and society rested in part on the capacity of the rich to corrupt governments in their own self-interest. Labor reform undertook the social and moral regeneration not only of the “commonwealth of toil,” but also of the nation’s political soul. “We stand as the conservators of society,” a Vermont labor leader declared in 1887, suggesting that working people sought to cleanse and revive republican government in the new context of economic growth. Observing this effort, labor editor John Swinton gleefully asserted, “There will soon be but two parties in the field, one composed of honest workingmen, lovers of justice and equality; the other . . . composed of kid-gloved, silk-stockinged, aristocratic capitalists and their contemptible toadies.”

The Democratic and Republican parties offered workers tangible benefits for participation in mainstream politics, trading municipal jobs for working-class votes. As cogs in well-oiled “machines”—coalitions of ward organizations that controlled politics and jobs in Gilded Age cities—many urban workers, native-born and immigrant alike, took advantage of these economic opportunities. In the West, political machines had ties to the railroads; the Union Pacific, for example, was deeply involved in the politics of Omaha, its eastern terminus. The multilayered state, county, and municipal machines of the South were central to maintaining the Democratic party’s power in that region.

Tammany Hall, New York City’s powerful Democratic organization and best-known urban machine, attracted working-class families from parishes and social networks all over the city by providing a range of vital social and personal services, including bail, emergency relief, and financial support of neighborhood social and cultural activities. Above all, jobs bound urban workers to political machines; Tammany dispensed some 12,000 patronage positions after its victory in the 1888 elections. With help from machine bosses, young Irish women got jobs in the public schools, their brothers found positions on the police force, and immigrants fresh off the boat went to work constructing city streets, bridges, and buildings. Meanwhile, Tammany bosses got wealthy from bribes and from so-called “honest graft”—profiting from knowledge about a new streetcar line by buying nearby land.

Labor reformers rejected Tammany and other political machines. They championed working-class political activism, which linked the economic struggle to truly oppositional contests in the electoral arena. Declaring in the midst of the 1886 boycotts that it was time to “boycott” the Democratic and Republican parties, New York’s Central Labor Union launched an independent labor party to run in the November city election. Their candidate for mayor was reformer and author Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty (1879) blamed inequality and corruption on the private ownership of land. George—with the help of the Knights of Labor, the New York Central Labor Union, and Father Edward McGlynn (a Catholic priest who embraced labor reform)—generated tremendous working-class support. He drew equally intense opposition from the church hierarchy, employers, and the Tammany machine, the last of which fielded iron magnate Abram Hewitt as the Democratic party’s nominee. Although George lost the election, he captured 70,000 votes, one-third of the total and far more than the Republican candidate, Theodore Roosevelt.

The George campaign was the most prominent but not the only labor-reform effort. In almost every town and city with Knights of Labor assemblies, workers discovered their political voice in 1886. Even as the Order itself declined, nearly two hundred Union Labor or Workingmen’s parties elected aldermen, mayors, and school board officials. In Rutland, Vermont, the United Labor forces scored a stunning victory, electing a Knights candidate to the state legislature and fifteen justices of the peace. In other places, labor managed to take control of one of the two established political parties.

This political activity produced legislative results. City councils and state legislatures passed laws protecting trade unions and establishing an eight-hour day for public employees. Sometimes simply the threat of third parties provoked concessions from officials, who passed prolabor legislation or put “friends of the workingman” on their slates. In Rochester, New Hampshire, the entry of the Knights of Labor into politics forced the Democratic party to endorse the new labor ticket. The Knights claimed in November 1886 that they had elected a dozen U.S. congressmen, almost all of them members of the established parties who had joined with the labor-reform forces.

Badly shaken by labor’s political upsurge, Democratic and Republican urban machines attempted to co-opt many of its issues. In New York, Tammany endorsed the establishment of a Bureau of Labor Statistics, called for a legal “Labor Day” holiday, and made a variety of other gestures to regain the following it had lost during the George campaign. But what primarily brought trade unionists, like other working people, into the political system was patronage—the provision of municipal jobs to key supporters. By the late 1880s, for example, Chicago’s city payroll included more than 400 Knights.

Many white male skilled workers left the Knights of Labor during the period of legal repression that followed the Haymarket bombing in 1886. Both the Knights and the local and national trade unions organized by craft unions had agitated for the eight-hour day, mounted mass strikes and boycotts, and supported reform legislation. But in the wake of the Haymarket affair, the craft unions, rejecting the Knights’ inclusive social and organizational vision, narrowed their focus to issues that were relevant to their own members.

The breach between the Knights and the craft unions widened significantly with the creation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In May 1886, Samuel Gompers, a leader of the Cigar Makers’ International Union, invited all the national unions to meet and formulate a common position with respect to the Knights. In December, the craft unionists organized a loose alliance of independent national unions. They elected Gompers president, a position that he was to hold for most of the next four decades. Local AFL unions and assemblies of the Knights broke each others’ strikes and invaded each others’ territory as the AFL gained strength and the Knights declined.

Most of the unionists who were drawn to the AFL had skills that enabled them to bargain effectively with their employers. These workers could secure concessions from employers as long as they limited their demands to improved wages and working conditions. Disillusioned with the defeats of mass strikes and with broad reform programs that would not win immediate material gains, these skilled craft unionists defined an organizational strategy that they hoped would maximize their power and minimize their vulnerability.

The story of Patrick Henry McCarthy testifies to the extraordinary economic and political power exercised by skilled workers. Born in Ireland on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1863, McCarthy arrived in the United States at age seventeen and worked as a carpenter’s apprentice. He settled in San Francisco in 1886, where he organized the city’s powerful Building Trades Council in 1898 and ran it with an iron hand for twenty-four years.

San Francisco building tradesmen had been in great demand ever since the days of the Gold Rush. When McCarthy arrived, the city was already a center of trade union power, and the building unions exercised tight control of the labor market. No one worked without a union card, everyone worked under union rules at good wages, and union men informally restricted their output so there would be enough work for all. These privileged workers jealously guarded the gates to their trade; some building unions barred all but their members’ sons. A Black or Asian man had no chance of being admitted. McCarthy, the czar of this labor fiefdom, had little interest in unions outside of the building trades and even less concern for the plight of San Francisco’s unorganized workers.

With Samuel Gompers as their national spokesman, the leaders of individual trade unions like those in McCarthy’s Building Trades Council developed the concept of “business unionism.” Their national unions were strong organizations of skilled workers; each had exclusive jurisdiction within a specific craft, charged relatively high dues, and maintained ample funds to finance a strike. Business unionism focused on concrete material goals, to be achieved through collective bargaining with the employer. Willing to use political action if necessary—to fight for protective tariffs or against competition from prison labor—business unionists generally avoided involvement in broad-based political movements.

Although business unionists usually accepted capitalist economic relations and the prevailing social and political order, the AFL and its constituent unions did not lack for militancy, and the rhetoric of the labor movement remained radical. McCarthy’s Building Trades Council championed cooperative enterprises and land reform, calling such plans a way to free white workers from wage labor and turn control of the urban-industrial order over to the broad mass of American citizens. The national unions often championed craftsmen’s efforts to win an eight-hour day, to defend their organizations, and to protect their traditional control over their jobs.

Strikes became more numerous, better organized, more disciplined, and more successful. Unions won more than 60 percent of the strikes waged in 1889 and 1890. And the strikes of AFL affiliates did not merely express the wage goals of narrow occupational groups. The organization backed sympathy strikes, in which workers demonstrated their support of another striking union by refusing to work. When New York’s cabinetmakers struck to preserve their union in 1892, for example, more than eleven other craft groups employed in over one hundred firms joined them. Sympathetic job actions increased nearly fourfold in the early 1890s.

As the AFL gained strength among skilled white workers, the Knights of Labor shifted its sights to rural Black workers, western and southern miners, and unskilled immigrants. Although leadership remained in the hands of white English-speaking labor reformers, most new members in the southern countryside were African American tenants, miners, rural day laborers, and domestic workers. Long known for advocacy of African American rights, the Knights of Labor increasingly became a Black organization in the South. In 1887, for example, 10,000 sugar plantation workers in Louisiana, almost all of them Black and members of the Knights, struck for higher wages and an end to payment in scrip. Frightened planters mobilized the state militia and vigilantes, declared martial law, and unleashed a deadly assault that killed more than fifty Black strikers in just one confrontation.

The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) also played an important role in organizing Black workers. Founded in 1890 with the support of dozens of local Knights assemblies in coal-mining areas, the UMWA embraced the Knights of Labor’s broad, inclusive vision and initially affiliated with both the Knights and the AFL. The UMWA struggled from the outset to build an interracial, industrial union for skilled and unskilled mine workers alike.

One UMWA organizer, Richard L. Davis, traveled all over the South to exhort his fellow Black miners to join the union. During the 1890s, he worked as a UMWA organizer throughout Ohio, West Virginia, and Alabama. In 1896 and 1897, he won election to the union’s National Executive Board, the only African American to hold a national union office. Repeatedly battling segregation and the distorting influence of “the race question,” Davis observed, “I think were we, as workingmen, to turn our attention to fighting monopoly in land and money, we would accomplish a great deal more than we will by fighting among ourselves on account of race, creed, color, or nationality.”

Encouraged by the efforts of Davis and other organizers and by the earlier successes of the Knights, the UMWA brought Black and white mine workers together in dozens of local unions in the southern West Virginia coalfields. Miners elected a succession of Black miners to the West Virginia district vice presidency between 1891 and 1898, and, in turn, Black miners provided most stalwart supporters for the UMWA in West Virginia during these years.

Unfortunately, other unions did not follow the same path. Most national unions, reflecting the racism of their members, became narrow organizations of skilled, white male workers. Rejecting the Knights’ commitment to interracialism and broad industrial organization and the miners’ inclusive approach to organizing, craft unions—notably those in the building trades and the railroad brotherhoods—systematically excluded Black workers and the unskilled. The increasingly businesslike and racist policies of AFL craft unionism had overwhelmed the Knights’ broader vision of working-class organization.

The violence, racial strife, and class conflict that defined industrial life in the 1870s and 1880s found expression not only in industrial towns but also in rural areas, where workers and small farmers opposed powerful economic groups. Here, as in the cities, the power of the wealthy was based on their money, while the power of the poor was grounded in their communities.

By the end of Reconstruction, rural African Americans had created a dense web of churches, fraternal lodges, and educational institutions, and these still served as the basis for political networks even after the white “redemption” of Southern politics. Despite the violent repression that followed the end of Reconstruction, rural African Americans continued to vote in some areas until the end of the century. Most notable was the biracial Readjuster insurgency in Virginia, which successfully challenged white Democratic rule in the 1880s. Grassroots Black political activity was powerful enough in Virginia to send to Congress in 1888 the formerly enslaved John Mercer Langston, Virginia’s first Black Congressman—and the last for another 104 years.

White Southern farmers also rooted their political efforts in local communities. Struggling for economic self-sufficiency, the independent white farmers of the South relied on one another for loans of much-needed cash and for assistance with large jobs. Kinship connections reinforced this interdependence, and neighboring farm families swapped work and labored together at parties or “bees,” much as their western counterparts did. Farmers’ independence and mutuality were thus intimately linked, even as expanding rail lines and the tightening noose of credit drew them beyond their communities into national and even world markets.

In the Georgia hills, farmers called on their community ties to protect their common-law rights to graze animals on unfenced land. Merchants and landlords with interests in protecting crops demanded laws requiring farmers to enclose their livestock and defining the boundaries of their land as legal fences. Railroad companies, liable for damages if locomotives struck wandering animals, welcomed this attack on open grazing. But poor people, landless or with only small holdings, needed open grazing to sustain their herds and remain independent of sharecropping and debt peonage.

“We as poor men and Negroes do not need the law,” cried one Georgia farmer in 1885, “but we need a democratic government and independence that will do the common people good.” As another farmer argued, the law requiring fencing was “ultimately going to be the ruin of people and especially the poor people that have nowhere to keep their stock [and] . . . are entirely dependent on the landowners for pasture.” Battles raged over elections that were called to determine whether land should be fenced. The advocates of fencing won, but they had trouble securing their victory. Outlaws lurking in the Georgia night tore down fences, smashed gates, and threatened proponents of enclosure.

The values expressed in Georgia were mirrored across the country in other conflicts over enclosure. In New Mexico, Juan José Herrerra led a group of Hispanic villagers against powerful cattle ranchers and landowners who had begun fencing the best pasturing and watering lands, which previously had been held in common. Calling themselves Las Gorras Blancas (“the White Caps”), Mexican farmers in 1889 burned fences, cut barbed wire, and generally terrorized cattlemen. At their peak, Las Gorras Blancas claimed more than 1,500 members, garnering the support of the entire Mexican American community and even of some Anglos. They stated their program simply: “Our purpose is to protect the rights and interest of the people in general and especially those of the helpless classes.” Among their opponents they listed “land grabbers,” political bosses, and monopolizers of water.

Las Gorras Blancas also fought against lumber operations and the railroads. During the building of the Santa Fe Railroad, they burned track, stopped men hauling railroad ties, and sent threatening letters to foremen denouncing unacceptable wage rates. Because they saw themselves as part of a larger collective movement of resistance against industrial capitalism, they applied for membership as an assembly of the Knights of Labor. In the early 1890s, they affiliated with the radical agrarian People’s (Populist) Party (discussed in Chapter 3), which won several elections in New Mexico in the 1890s.

At about the same time, neighborhood bands in the Cross Timbers region of Texas were enforcing a similar belief that ownership of the land did not convey the right to restrict free access to grass and water. Many inhabitants were of Scots-Irish and Irish descent, and their deep-seated, traditional dislike of landlords found an outlet in the cry “Land to the cultivator!” Brash fence cutters left taunting notes: “We understand you have plenty of money to spend to build fences. Please put them up again for us to cut them down again. We want the fence guarded with good men so that their mettle can be tested.

The defense of common rights in Texas was linked to a growing opposition to those who monopolized land and credit. Song and story celebrated Sam Bass, a former Indiana farmhand, as “the Robin Hood of Cross Timbers,” for stealing from the railroads. Bass may not have considered his crimes symbolic of community resistance to capitalist speculation, but others saw him in that light. Bandits such as Bass and the more infamous Jesse James won the acclaim of farmers and urban workers across the country by taking on railroads and banks, repositories of corporate capital in the Gilded Age.

What does the story of Las Gorras Blancas reveal about land use and land rights in the territory annexed from Mexico?

The same community basis for class struggles against capitalists could also be found in industrial cities and towns. Yet one of the era’s most famous strikes—at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel mill in 1892—demonstrated that locally organized workers could not easily defeat new, nationally organized corporations. For their part, urban craft workers seemed to have the upper hand in the campaign to improve their circumstances. The AFL craft unions had consolidated their influence in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Skilled iron and steel workers, in particular, had won high wages based on their knowledge and command of the production process and on their unity in dealing with employers.

At Carnegie’s Homestead works, one of the most advanced mills in the world, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers had won an important victory in 1889, securing wages that were one-third higher than those paid to skilled workers at neighboring mills. In addition, the settlement pegged the wages of unorganized unskilled workers to those of the skilled craftsmen. The contract therefore benefited not only skilled unionized workers, but their unskilled nonunion helpers as well.

In Homestead, as elsewhere, community ties reinforced relationships formed on the job. Homestead, with twelve mills, was one of the world’s largest industrial complexes in the late nineteenth century. Of its 11,000 residents, 3,800 men worked in the mills—virtually one person from every household. Steelworkers headed the city government and police department and owned most of Homestead’s modest homes. Steelworkers saw unionism as a right of citizenship, a bulwark against dependency, and a protector of workers’ positions as homeowners in a community they had made their own. As a state militia officer wonderingly remarked, “They believe the works are theirs quite as much as Carnegie’s.”

Carnegie and his partner, Henry Clay Frick, believed differently, and they decided to break the union’s power. Carnegie wanted a cheap and docile labor force, and the Amalgamated Association stood in his way. In June 1892, as Carnegie hid away in Scotland, Frick broke off contract renewal negotiations with union representatives, announcing that the company would in the future bargain only with individual workers. He then prepared for battle, surrounding the mills with three miles of twelve-foot steel fence topped with barbed wire; workers dubbed the complex “Fort Frick.” He also hired 300 armed Pinkerton agents to protect the scab replacement workers he planned to bring in by boat on the Monongahela River, which ran along company property. On July 2, Frick locked out the workers, shut down the Homestead works, and announced that they would reopen with nonunion labor. The Amalgamated Association responded by mobilizing virtually the entire town, organizing a paramilitary takeover of the local utilities, monitoring all access to Homestead, and closing the saloons.

On July 6, the heavily armed Pinkertons approached the plant from a barge on the river. Armed with guns, rocks, and a small cannon, an enraged crowd of steelworkers and their wives met the Pinkertons at the river’s edge. Nine strikers and seven Pinkertons died during a twelve-hour battle, and many more were wounded. The Pinkertons surrendered to the workers.

In the days that followed, the confrontation spread beyond Homestead as lockouts and sympathy strikes shut down other Carnegie mills. But the Carnegie Company persuaded the governor to send in the Pennsylvania militia, which escorted repairmen, mechanics, and strikebreakers (recruited from as far away as Ohio) into Carnegie’s plants. Still, the Amalgamated Association hung on for four more months. Frick wrote Carnegie, “The firmness with which these strikers hold on is surprising to everyone.”

The workers believed that they had right on their side, but Carnegie had might. As the company restored production and winter approached, morale faded. On November 20, 1892, the union surrendered; the company fired and blacklisted the Amalgamated leaders. Frick cabled Carnegie: “Our victory is now complete and most gratifying. Do not think we will ever have any serious labor trouble again.”

The defeat at Homestead dealt the skilled men of the Amalgamated Association—and craft unionism in general—a stunning blow. It shattered their union and their faith in their powerful craft organization. They had learned about the power of capital and had experienced firsthand the role of government in labor-capital conflict. Technological change had eroded skilled workers’ central role in the production process and made them increasingly vulnerable. Gone were the days when skilled craft workers had only to withhold their labor to get bosses to agree to their demands.

Days after the Homestead workers returned to the mills, another violent incident pitted strikers against strikebreakers and company guards, this time in the silver-mining region of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Here, too, the owners called on state government for help. The governor of Idaho declared martial law and sent in the state militia, and the striking workers capitulated. Other major labor defeats in 1892 included a strike by switchmen in the Buffalo railway yards, a strike by Knights of Labor in Tennessee coal mines, and a general strike by Black and white workers in New Orleans.

Faced with this record of crushing setbacks, AFL president Samuel Gompers asked, “Shall we change our methods?” AFL union membership held steady despite the 1892 losses, and Gompers answered in the negative, believing that trade unions’ very survival in the face of employers’ all-out attacks proved his policies correct. But he missed the larger meaning of the year’s events. In the face of overwhelming defeat, the culture of solidarity that had inspired many skilled craft workers for thirty years was in decline. If Haymarket in 1886 represented the destruction of the Knights’ broad vision of labor unity among workers of diverse backgrounds and skills, the narrower but sustaining vision of craft unionism met an equivalent defeat at Homestead and other sites in 1892.

Another lesson of the 1892 strikes was that political power was shifting from the local to the state level. Large corporations could exert greater influence over governors than over mayors and aldermen—especially in communities where the political power of working people remained significant. Fortified by increasing government support, employers made it clear that they would do everything possible to destroy the labor movement.