From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  Desperate to recoup the losses of 1894, the Democrats took up the Populist call for “bimetallism” and nominated Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896. A former Congressman and popular orator, he had been stumping the country to speak on the silver issue. After rancorous debate and division, the Populists also nominated Bryan, though he did not endorse most of their program. Republican William McKinley swamped him at the polls, and the Populist moment passed.

  Labor activists drew different lessons from the devastating defeats of the Homestead and Pullman strikes. Eugene Debs and his comrades saw the need for even greater solidarity. Samuel Gompers and many craft unionists concluded that it was futile to challenge the combined might of big business and government; judicious, “pure and simple unionism” worked best. Years later, Gompers said of the Briggs House conference, “The course pursued by the Federation was the biggest service that could have been performed to maintain the integrity of the Railroad Brotherhoods.”

  The Populist failure in 1896 likewise offered contradictory lessons. Gompers favored cultivating those business and political leaders least hostile to labor. Debs concluded that only “the ballots of workingmen emancipated from the [old] parties would bring a higher plane of prosperity.” Others rejected politics as a game completely controlled by capital.

  “How can the trade unions successfully combat the giant monstrosities of the nineteenth century?” asked George McNeill in an 1896 article titled “The Trade Unions and the Monopolies.” If many people agreed that unions were powerless against the “power of aggregated wealth,” this veteran labor leader thought otherwise, and he proposed a six-point program:

  (1)restructure unions to fit mass production in monopolized industries, where unskilled and semiskilled workers had become the majority;

  (2)fund a national campaign to organize the unorganized regardless of skill, race, creed, color, nationality, and sex;

  (3)promote cooperation among craft unions in monopoly industries

  (4)provide financial support to strikers and pensions for workers disabled or blacklisted in strikes;

  (5)create antimonopoly alliances with farmers and small businessmen;

  (6)develop an educational program to rally the population against the monopolies.

  McNeill’s article was widely reprinted and discussed. Several unions endorsed it and called on the AFL to convene a conference and get started. The Federation ignored them.

  * Rail and manufacturing corporations tried combining to fix prices and divide up markets. The courts outlawed such combinations, but they were weak anyway. Their members repeatedly reneged on promises to cooperate, touching off new free-for-all price wars and market grabs.

  * Congress declared Labor Day a federal holiday in 1894.

  * The last K of L assembly—motion-picture projectionists in Boston—merged into the American Federation of Labor in 1949.

  * At that founding meeting, a proposal to admit black members was defeated 113 to 102. The ARU did admit women and supported equal pay for equal work.

  CHAPTER

  6

  LABOR AND EMPIRE

  In November 1897, Samuel Gompers’s monthly column in the American Federationist focused on Hawaii. Four years earlier American sugar planters had deposed Queen Liliuokalani, set up a sham “Republic,” and asked for annexation to the United States. Now the Senate debated the proposal. Gompers opposed it and he rebuked its advocates for “cover[ing] themselves with the mantle of patriotism.” In fact, he wrote, the scheme was merely “corporate power . . . endeavoring to invade acquired, natural, and constitutional rights.” Twenty years later Gompers would become one of the nation’s leading proponents of America’s transformation into a world power. That shift took place in the context of a vast expansion of U.S. capitalism abroad and rapprochement between government and labor leaders willing to support the empire.

  EMPIRE ABROAD, EMPIRE AT HOME

  In 1898, the United States moved into the ranks of modern world powers by defeating the forces of Spain, one of the oldest European empires. The Spanish-American War’s official purpose was to help Cubans free themselves from Spanish colonialism. The Cuban rebellion had been building for decades, and armed insurrection broke out in 1895. Many ordinary Americans sympathized with the rebels. So did U.S. businessmen, who had invested $50 million in Cuban sugar plantations and aimed to invest more once Cuba was free. Early in 1898, President McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Havana to demonstrate American interest in Cuba; it blew up on February 15, killing 266 sailors. U.S. newspapers, some of which had called for the acquisition of Cuba as early as the 1850s, screamed for military reprisal. On April 20, Congress declared war on Spain. Fighting began on May 1 in the Philippines, where a rebellion against Spanish rule was already in progress. By the time the war ended in August, U.S. troops had also invaded Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Wake Island, and Congress had annexed Hawaii. John Hay, U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, called it “a splendid little war.” U.S. combat deaths totaled 379, though over 5,000 troops died from disease or canned rations of rotted beef. Under the peace treaty, the United States acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as colonies, and the U.S. military administered Cuba until an independent government was formed.

  Puerto Rican patriots protested their island’s treatment as spoils of war. As a pamphlet stated, “The voice of Puerto Rico has not been heard. Not even by way of formality were its inhabitants consulted. . . . The island and all its people were simply transferred from one sovereign power to another, just as a farm with all its equipment, houses and animals is passed from one landlord to another.” U.S. governors abolished local councils, revised laws, and even changed the island’s name to “Porto Rico”—easier for English speakers to pronounce. In 1900, Congress made Puerto Rico a “nonincorporated” territory.

  In the Philippines, the United States faced an armed movement for independence that controlled most of the archipelago. Under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, the Revolutionary Congress wrote a constitution, and the Philippine Republic was inaugurated in January 1899. Within days, U.S. forces moved against the Republican army, commencing a three-year war that involved 126,000 American troops. On July 4, 1902, Washington declared the war won, but new rebellions gathered and fighting continued for another twelve years.

  Overseas expansion was not a novel idea. The United States had seized the island of Navassa from Haiti in 1858, purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, and the same year claimed Midway in the Pacific. But now expansionism gained more momentum than ever before. A host of politicians, professors, clergymen, editors, and military leaders contended that empire building was essential to national stability.

  The nation’s industrial capacity significantly exceeded domestic demand; that had been the chief cause of depressions and deflation in the Gilded Age. U.S. Labor Commissioner Carroll Wright observed in the early 1890s, “It is incontrovertible that the present manufacturing and mechanical plant of the United States is greater . . . than is needed to supply the demand; yet it is constantly being enlarged, and there is no way of preventing the enlargement.” An overseas empire promised relief. As historian Henry Brooks Adams wrote in 1900, “The United States must provide sure and adequate outlets for her products, or be in danger of gluts more dangerous to her society than many panics such as 1873 and 1893.”

  Imperialists also hoped that overseas military adventures would absorb popular energy. The Atlantic Monthly magazine endorsed war with Spain partly on the grounds that it would reduce social unrest: “Apostolic fervor, romantic dreaming, and blatant misinformation have each captivated the idle-minded masses. . . . These things all denote a lack of adventurous opportunities.” A sociology professor at Columbia University argued that, if Americans did not spend their “reservoir of energy” in overseas conquests, it would “discharge itself in anarchistic, socialistic, and other destructive modes . . . likely to work uncalculable mischief.”

  Racism bolstered expans
ionism. “Take up the White Man’s burden,” urged British writer Rudyard Kipling in a widely reprinted poem that welcomed the United States to the ranks of colonial powers ruling “new-caught sullen peoples” of Asia and Africa. Theodore Roosevelt—Spanish-American War hero and McKinley’s running mate in 1900—complained of expansionism’s opponents: “Often these stay-at-homes are too selfish and indolent, too lacking in imagination, to understand the race-importance of the work which is done by pioneer brethren in wild and distant lands.”

  Racist expansionism closely paralleled white supremacy at home. Quoting Kipling’s poem, the Atlantic Monthly asked in an editorial, “If the stronger and cleverer race is free to impose its will upon ‘new-caught sullen peoples’ on the other side of the globe, why not in South Carolina and Mississippi?” In 1890, Mississippi had disenfranchised most black men by imposing a literacy test on voters;in 1895, South Carolina had followed suit and instituted a poll tax as well. After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Mississippi restrictions in 1898, black disenfranchisement spread to Louisiana (1900), Alabama (1901), and on across the South. Writing to the Richmond Planet, Sergeant Major John Galloway, a black soldier stationed in the Philippines, predicted, “The future of the Filipino . . . is that of the Negro in the South.” He was right. In 1901 the Supreme Court ruled that residents of the new U.S. colonies did not automatically enjoy rights and protections guaranteed by the Constitution.

  Opposition to empire building was widespread at the turn of the century. Old-fashioned republicans despised colonialism; some racial purists fretted that colonial subjects might become citizens; businessmen worried about military costs; farmers feared competition from imported produce. Labor unions played an active role in the antiimperialist movement. Some unionists opposed wars of conquest on principle. Many others feared that militarism abroad would lead to repression at home.

  Samuel Gompers denounced cheap colonial products and labor. In November 1898, he became a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League, joining businessmen like Andrew Carnegie and politicians like Grover Cleveland. The League enrolled 500,000 members but failed to defeat McKinley’s bid for re-election in 1900 and faded soon afterward. Criticism of expansion quickly disappeared from the labor press. In 1901, Gompers rejoiced in the Federationist, “Never was labor better organized and alive to its interests than now, and never was America’s foreign trade so stupendous.”

  The American Federation of Labor had mixed relations with labor movements in the new colonies. In Puerto Rico, the Federación Libre de Trabajadores (FLT) accepted annexation to the United States and focused on winning an American standard of living for Puerto Rican workers. The AFL hired the FLT’s founder Santiago Iglesias as an organizer in 1901. In the Philippines, the Union Obrera Democratica rallied for independence. Suppressed by the U.S. military, it reorganized in 1903 and in Manila led a May Day march of 100,000 demanding an end to U.S. occupation. For this the Union was suppressed once again. In 1904, the AFL declined to organize Manila cigar makers for fear of abetting “agitation of Philippine independence, very strong among the better class of workers.” In Hawaii, white craftsmen from the States joined AFL unions, but the white unions had nothing to do with Asian workers organizing on the sugar plantations.

  In the wake of the Spanish-American war, the mainland economy flourished. The depression of the 1890s had ended by the time the war began; now the recovery turned into a boom. The wave of corporate mergers, which had paused during the depression, resumed and accelerated. Consortiums of financiers created holding companies beyond the reach of antitrust legislation. Between 1898 and 1903 thousands of firms were absorbed into ever larger holding companies. The largest of all was United States Steel, formed in 1901 by J. P. Morgan of New York and Elbert Gary of Chicago after they bought a controlling interest in Carnegie Steel. Capitalized at $1.4 billion, U.S. Steel held 165 subsidiaries in a constellation of industries—steel, mining, shipping, and construction. Mergers reduced the ruinous competition of the Gilded Age.

  Government regulated industry and commerce in business-friendly ways. The first federal regulatory agency—the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)—had accomplished virtually nothing since its establishment in 1887. Congress had authorized it merely to investigate freight railroads and make nonbinding recommendations as to the rates they should charge. In 1906, the ICC’s powers expanded. Thanks to lobbying by manufacturers and merchants seeking predictable shipping costs, the agency now got jurisdiction over all interstate transportation, and its rulings on rates became binding unless overturned by the courts. A consortium of food companies lobbied for the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which imposed product standards acceptable to manufacturers. Bankers designed the Federal Reserve System, established in 1913 to regulate finance. The Federal Trade Commission—set up the following year to regulate industrial corporations—was the brainchild of business magnates, most notably George Perkins of U.S. Steel.

  Exports helped to sustain the business boom. The dollar volume of U.S. goods sold abroad increased by more than 50 percent between 1901 and 1914. Capital became an even more important export. As an economist pointed out in 1899, “The real opportunity afforded by colonial possessions is for the development of the new countries by fixed investment.” U.S. foreign investment—mostly in Latin America and Canada—more than tripled by 1914. Puerto Rican sugar production expanded under a monopoly of four U.S. corporations. The greatest prizes in the Philippines were the “friar lands,” close to a half-million acres of estates abandoned by the Spanish Catholic Church. The United States paid the Vatican for their titles and auctioned them off, mostly to American sugar planters.

  The most important U.S. import was labor. Immigration to the United States rose from 229,000 arrivals in 1898 to more than 800,000 in 1904 and averaged about a million a year over the next decade. The vast majority of immigrants now came from eastern and southern Europe, and arrivals from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean reached new heights. The result, to quote one historian, was “nothing less than the ethnic recomposition of the American working class.” The so-called American worker—a descendant of northwestern Europe—became a relatively privileged minority of the labor force.

  To native-born “old” Americans, the crowded immigrant ghettoes of modern cities seemed to be cesspools of vice and crime and a threat to social order. Proposed solutions came from many quarters. Old-fashioned evangelists and moral reformers campaigned to eradicate drinking, gambling, and prostitution. Newer ideas came from middle-class reformers who called themselves “progressives.” Social workers in immigrant communities promoted vocational training, employment bureaus, and education in American customs and hygiene. Doctors, lawyers, social scientists, and other professionals advocated stricter housing codes and public sanitation. The impulse for reform ranged so widely that the age became known as the “Progressive Era.”

  Virtually every industrial state saw campaigns to ban child labor, regulate hours and conditions for women and teenagers, set standards for workplace safety and health, and create funds to compensate workers injured on the job. Beginning in Illinois in 1893, reformers in several states had lobbied successfully for labor laws to protect children and women in manufacturing, but these protections were often overturned in court or (simply) not enforced. When Congress took up child labor legislation starting in 1906, southern textile manufacturers fiercely resisted it; but northern companies, already bound by state restrictions on child labor, supported federal action to reduce the competition’s advantage. While some business groups opposed laws for workers’ injury compensation, others joined the campaign in order to coopt it. In 1911, the National Association of Manufacturers wrote a “model” compensation law that restricted injured workers’ claims. Within three years business lobbyists had persuaded twenty-five states to adopt the Association’s formula.

  Businessmen were also ambivalent about political reforms. “Good government” progressives challenged urban poli
tical machines like the New York Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall, urged the appointment of experts as public administrators, and pushed to replace mayoral administration with appointed commissioners or city managers. As the president of National Cash Register observed, such reforms put government “on a strict business basis.”

  Businessmen and many progressives were less enthusiastic about democracy. To quote one business paper: “We have faith in popular opinion . . . when it is instructed, sober, moral, true. But we have no faith in popular opinion when it is rash, passionate, prejudiced and ignorant.” Common reforms aimed at regulating voting included literacy tests, registration far in advance of elections, and ballots supplied by election commissions instead of party clubhouses. Democratic reforms like ballot initiatives and recall elections were less widely adopted. Voter participation in elections fell from the 80 percent characteristic of the late nineteenth century to about 60 percent by 1920. Democracy did not appear in the ideal government described by one prominent progressive businessman: “the work of the state is to think for the people and plan for the people—to teach them how to do, what to do, and to sustain them in the doing.”

  Separation of the races, especially in the South, was the most sweeping manifestation of the Progressive Era’s obsession with social order. After the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Louisiana’s “separate but equal” railroad cars in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), white legislators enacted a myriad of laws that required the segregation of nearly every aspect of southern life, from streetcars, theaters, residences, and cemeteries to brothels and the Bibles used to swear in witnesses in court. According to some southern progressives, segregation solved the problem of violence between races. Others thought it would stabilize white society. Progressive activist Rev. Edgar Gardner Murphy of Montgomery, Alabama, wrote in 1904: “The conscious unity of race is . . . better as a basis of democratic reorganization than the distinctions of wealth, of trade, of property, of family, or class.”