by Howard Zinn
In the midst of the Homestead strike, a young anarchist from New York named Alexander Berkman, in a plan prepared by anarchist friends in New York, including his lover Emma Goldman, came to Pittsburgh and entered the office of Henry Clay Frick, determined to kill him. Berkman's aim was poor; he wounded Frick and was overwhelmed, then was tried and found guilty of attempted murder. He served fourteen years in the state penitentiary. His Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist gave a graphic description of the assassination attempt and of his years in prison, when he changed his mind about the usefulness of assassinations but remained a dedicated revolutionary. Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life, conveys the anger, the sense of injustice, the desire for a new kind of life, that grew among the young radicals of that day.
The year 1893 saw the biggest economic crisis in the country's history. After several decades of wild industrial growth, financial manipulation, uncontrolled speculation and profiteering, it all collapsed: 642 banks failed and 16,000 businesses closed down. Out of the labor force of 15 million, 3 million were unemployed. No state government voted relief, but mass demonstrations all over the country forced city governments to set up soup kitchens and give people work on streets or parks. In New York City, in Union Square, Emma Goldman addressed a huge meeting of the unemployed and urged those whose children
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needed food to go into the stores and take it. She was arrested for "inciting to riot" and sentenced to two years in prison. In Chicago, it was estimated that 200,000 people were without work, the floors and stairways of City Hall and the police stations packed every night with homeless men trying to sleep.
The Depression lasted for years and brought a wave of strikes throughout the country. The largest of these was the nationwide strike of railroad workers in 1894 that began at the Pullman Company in Illinois, just outside of Chicago.
Annual wages of railroad workers, aeeording to the report of the commissioner of labor in 1890, were $957 for engineers, the aristocrats of the railroad—but $575 for conductors, $212 for brakemen, and $124 for laborers. Railroad work was one of the most dangerous jobs in America; over two thousand railroad workers were being killed each year, and thirty thousand injured. The railroad companies called these "acts of God" or the result of "carelessness" on the part of the workers, but the Locomotive Firemen's Magazine said: "It comes to this: while railroad managers reduce their force and require men to do double duty, involving loss of rest and sleep . . . the accidents are chargeable to the greed of the corporation."
It was the Depression of 1893 that propelled Eugene Debs into a lifetime of action for unionism and socialism. Debs was from Terre Haute, Indiana, where his father and mother ran a store. He had worked on the railroads for four years until he was nineteen, but left when a friend was killed after falling under a locomotive. He came back to join a Railroad Brotherhood as a hilling clerk. At the time of the great strikes of 1877, Debs opposed them and argued there was no "necessary conflict between capital and labor." But when he read Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, it deeply affected him. He followed the events at Homestead, Coeur d'Alene, the Buffalo switchmen's strike, and wrote:
If the year 1892 taught the worldngmen any lesson worthy of heed, it was that the capitalist class, like a devilfish, had grasped them with its tentacles and was dragging them down to fathomless depths of degradation. 'lb escape the prehensile clutch of these monsters, constitutes a standing challenge to organized labor for 1893.
In the midst of the economic crisis of 1893, a small group of railroad workers, including Debs, formed the American Railway Union, to unite all railway workers. Debs said:
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A life purpose of mine has been the federation of railroad employees. 1b unify them into one great body is my object. . . . Class enrollment fosters class prejudices and class selfishness. ... It has been my life's desire to unify railroad employees and to eliminate the aristocracy of labor ... and organize them so all will he on an equality. ...
Knights of Labor people came in, virtually merging the old Knights with the American Railway Union, according to labor historian David Montgomery.
Debs wanted to include everyone, but blacks were kept out: at a convention in 1894, the provision in the constitution barring blacks was affirmed by a vote of 112 to 100. Later, Debs thought this might have had a crucial effect on the outcome of the Pullman strike, for black workers were in no mood to cooperate with the strikers.
In June 1894, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike. One can get an idea of the kind of support they got, mostly from the immediate vicinity of Chicago, in the first months of the strike, from a list of contributions put together by the Reverend William H. Carwardine, a Methodist pastor in the company town of Pullman for three years (he was sent away after he supported the strikers):
Typographical Union #16 Painters and Decorators Union #147 Carpenters' Union No. 23 Thirty-fourth Ward Republican Club Grand Crossing Police Hyde Park Water Department Picnic at Gardener's Park Milk Dealer's Union Hyde Park Liquor Dealers Fourteenth Precinct Police Station Swedish Concert Chicago Fire Department German Singing Society Cheque from Anaconda, Montana
The Pullman strikers appealed to a convention of the American Railway Union for support:
Mr. President and Brothers of the American Railway Union. We struck at Pullman because we were without hope. We joined the American Railway
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Union because it gave us a glimmer of hope. Twenty thousand souls, men, women and little ones, have their eyes turned toward this convention today, straining eagerly through dark despondency for a glimmer of the heavensent message you alone can give us on this earth... .
You all must know that the proximate cause of our strike was the discharge of two members of our grievance committee.... Five reductions in wages.. .. The last was the most severe, amounting to nearly thirty per cent, and rents had not fallen. .. .
Water which Pullman buys from the city at 8 cents a thousand gallons he retails lo us at 500 percent advance. .. . Gas which sells at 75 cents per thousand feet in Hyde Park, just north of us, he sells for $2.25. When we went to tell him our grievances he said we were all his "children.".. .
Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouses, and churches of God in the town he gave his once humble name....
And thus the merry war—the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears—goes on, and it will go on, brothers, forever, unless you, the American Railway Union, stop it; end it; crush it out.
The American Railway Union responded. It asked its members all over the country not to handle Pullman cars. Since virtually all passenger trains had Pullman cars, this amounted to a boycott of all trains—a nationwide strike. Soon all traffic on the twenty-four railroad lines leading out of Chicago had come to a halt. Workers derailed freight cars, blocked tracks, pulled engineers off trains if they refused to cooperate.
The General Managers Association, representing the railroad owners, agreed to pay two thousand deputies, sent in to break the strike. But the strike went on. The Attorney General of the United States, Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, now got a court injunction against blocking trains, on the legal ground that the federal mails were being interfered with. When the strikers ignored the injunction, President Cleveland ordered federal troops to Chicago. On July 6, hundreds of cars were burned by strikers.
The following day, the state militia moved in, and the Chicago Times reported on what followed:
Company C. Second Regiment . . . disciplined a mob of rioters yesterday afternoon at Forty-ninth and Loomis Streets. The police assisted and . . . finished the job. There is no means of knowing how many rioters were killed or wounded. The mob carried off many of its dying and injured.
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A crowd of five thousand gathered. Rocks were thrown at the militia, and the command was given to fire.
... To say that the mob went wild is but a weak expression.. . . The command to charge was given. . .. From that moment only bayonets were used. ... A dozen men in the front line of rioters received bayonet woiinds. . ..
Tearing up cobble stones, the mob made a determined charge.... the word was passed along the line for each officer to take care of himself. One by one, as occasion demanded, they fired point blank into the crowd.. .. The police followed with their clubs. A wire fence inclosed the track. The rioters had forgotten it; when they turned to fly they were caught in a trap.
The police were not inclined to be merciful, and driving the mob against the barbed wires clubbed it unmercifully. .. . The crowd outside the fence rallied to the assistance of die rioters.... The shower of stones was incessant. . ..
The ground over which the fight had occurred was like a battlefield. The men shot by the troops and police lay about like logs.. ..
In Chicago that day, thirteen people were killed, fifty-three seriously wounded, seven hundred arrested. Before the strike was over, perhaps thirty-four were dead. With fourteen thousand police, militia, troops in Chicago, the strike was crushed. Debs was arrested for contempt of court, for violating the injunction that said he could not do or say anything to carry on the strike. He told the court: "It seems to me that if it were not for resistance to degrading conditions, the tendency of our whole civilization would be downward; after a while we would reach the point where there would be no resistance, and slavery would come,"
Debs, in court, denied he was a socialist. But during his six months in prison, he studied socialism and talked to fellow prisoners who were socialists. Later he wrote: "I was to be baptized in Socialism in the roar of conflict... in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed. ... This was my first practical struggle in Socialism."
Iwo years after he came out of prison, Debs wrote in the Rail-way Times:
The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because T am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society—we are on die eve of a universal change.
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Thus, the eighties and nineties saw bursts of labor insurrection, more organized than the spontaneous strikes of 1877. There were now revolutionary movements influencing labor struggles, the ideas of socialism affecting labor leaders. Radical literature was appearing, speaking of fundamental changes, of new possibilities for living.
In this same period, those who worked on the land—farmers, North and South, black and white—were going far beyond the scattered tenant protests of the pre-Civil War years and creating the greatest movement of agrarian rebellion the country had ever seen.
When the Homestead Act was being discussed in Congress in 1860, a Senator from Wisconsin said he supported it:
.. . because its benign operation will postpone for centuries, if it will not forever, all serious conflict between capital and labor in the older free States, withdrawing their surplus population to create in greater abundance the means of subsistence.
The Homestead Act did not have that effect. It did not bring tranquillity to the East by moving Americans to the West. It was not a safety valve for discontent, which was too great to be contained that way. As Henry Nash Smith says (Virgin Land), and as we have seen: "On the contrary, the three decades following its passage were marked by the most bitter and widespread labor trouble that had yet been seen in the United States."
It also failed to bring peace to the farm country of the West. Hamlin Garland, who made so many Americans aware of the life of the farmer, wrote in the preface to his novel Jason Edwards: 'Tree land is gone. The last acre of available farmland has now passed into private or corporate hands." In Jason Edwards a Boston mechanic takes his family West, drawn by advertising circulars. But he finds that all land within 30 miles of a railroad has been taken up by speculators. He struggles for five years to pay off a loan and get title to his farm, and then a storm destroys his wheat just before harvest.
Behind the despair so often registered in the farm country literature of that day, there must have been visions, from time to time, of a different way to live. In another Garland novel, A Spoil of Office, the heroine speaks at a farmers' picnic:
I see a time when the fanner will not need to live in a cabin on a lonely farm. I see the fanners coming together in groups. I see them with time to read, and time to visit with their fellows. I see diem enjoying lectures in beautiful
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halls, erected in every village. I see them gather like the Saxons of old upon the green at evening to sing and dance. T see cities rising near them with schools, and churches, and concert halls and theaters. I see a day when the farmer will no longer be a drudge and his wife a bond slave, but happy men and women who will go singing to their pleasant tasks upon their fruitful farms. When die boys and girls will not go west nor to the city; when life will be worth living. In that day the moon will be brighter and die stars more glad, and pleasure and poetry and love of life come back to the man who tills die soil.
Hamlin Garland dedicated Jason Ed-wards, written in 1891, to the Farmers Alliance. It was the Farmers Alliance that was the core of the great movement of die 1880s and 1890s later known as the Populist Movement.
Between 1860 and 1910, the U.S. army, wiping out the Indian villages on the Great Plains, paved the way for the railroads to move in and take the best land. Then the farmers came for what was left. From 1860 to 1900 the population of the United States grew from 31 million to 75 million; now 20 million people lived west of the Mississippi, and the number of farms grew from 2 million to 6 million. With the crowded cities of the East needing food, the internal market for food was more than doubled; 82 percent of the farm produce was sold inside the United States.
Farming became mechanized—steel plows, mowing machines, reapers, harvesters, improved cotton gins for pulling the fibers away from the seed, and, by the turn of the century, giant combines that cut the grain, threshed it, and put it in bags. In 1830 a bushel of wheat had taken three hours to produce. By 1900, it took ten minutes. Specialization developed by region: cotton and tobacco in the South, wheat and corn in the Midwest.
Land cost money, and machines cost money—so farmers had to borrow, hoping that the prices of their harvests would stay high, so they could pay the bank for the loan, the railroad for transportation, the grain merchant for handling their grain, die storage elevator for storing it. But they found the prices for their produce going down, and the prices of transportation and loans going up, because the individual farmer could not control die price of his grain, while the monopolist railroad and the monopolist banker could charge what they liked.
William Faulkner, in his novel The Hamlet, described the man on whom southern farmers depended:
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He was the largest landholder ... in one county, and Justice of the Peace in the next, and election commissioner in both.... He was a fanner, a usurer, a veterinarian.... He owned most of the good land in the county and held mortgages on most of the rest. He owned the store and the cotton gin and the combined grist mill and blacksmith shop.. ..
The farmers who could not pay saw their homes and land taken away. They became tenants. By 1880, 25 percent of all farms were rented by tenants, and the number kept rising. Many did not even have money to rent and became farm laborers; by 1900 there were 4J/2 million farm laborers in the country. It was the fate that awaited every farmer who couldn't pay his debts.
Could the squeezed and desperate farmer turn to the government for help? Lawrence Goodwyn, in his study of the Populist movement (The Democratic Promise), says that after the Civil
War both parties now were controlled by capitalists. They were divided along North-South lines, still hung over with the animosities of the Civil War. This made it very hard to create a fiarty of reform cutting across both parties to unite working people South and North—to say nothing of black and white, foreign-born and native-born.
The government played its part in helping the bankers and hurting the farmers; it kept the amount of money—based on the gold supply— steady, while the population rose, so there was less and less money in circulation. The farmer had to pay off his debts in dollars that were harder to get. The bankers, getting the loans back, were getting dollars worth more than when they loaned them out—a kind of interest on top of interest. That is why so much of the talk of farmers' movements in those days had to do with putting more money in circulation—by printing greenbacks (paper money for which there was no gold in the treasury) or by making silver a basis for issuing money.
It was in Texas that the Farmers Alliance movement began. It was in the South that the crop-lven system was most brutal. By this system the fanner would get the things he needed from the merchant: the use of the cotton gin at harvest time, whatever supplies were necessary. He didn't have money to pay, so the merchant would get a lien—a mortgage on his crop—on which the farmer might pay 25 percent interest. Goodwyn says "the crop lien system became for millions of Southerners, white and black, little more than a modified form of slavery." The man with the ledger became to the farmer "the furnishing man," to black farmers simply "the Man." The farmer would owe more money every year until finally his farm was taken away and he became a tenant.
Goodwyn gives two personal histories to illustrate this. A white farmer in South Carolina, between 1887 and 1895, bought goods and services from the furnishing merchant for $2,681.02 but was able to pay only $687.31, and finally He had to give his land to the merchant. A black farmer named Matt Brown, in Black Hawk, Mississippi, between 1884 and 1901, bought his supplies from the Jones store, kept falling further and further behind, and in 1905 the last entry in the merchant's ledger is for a coffin and burial supplies.