Employers responded by firing and blacklisting labor organizers and taking unions to court on charges of criminal conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of employers. In 1835, the New York State Supreme Court ruled unions and strikes illegal under conspiracy laws. The court thus affirmed the owners’ claim that it was legal for owners to organize to deny workers their basic rights, but that workers who organized in defense of their rights were engaged in an illegal conspiracy to restrain trade and the beneficial forces of the free market.17
Workers responded by turning from strikes to petition drives aimed at winning legislators to their cause and to voter mobilization in support of political candidates sympathetic to their demands, which included a ten-hour day and the distribution of public lands to homesteaders to 208reduce unemployment and the downward pressure on wages. As fast as state legislatures yielded to worker pressures to pass laws on working hours, however, employers found and exploited loopholes to circumvent them, often with the support of judges sympathetic to their interests.18
Growing Power of Property
As the country and the railroads expanded, vast tracts of the land expropriated by the government from the Native Americans by deadly force were given to railroad corporations as an incentive to rapidly extend their rail networks into lands newly opened to white settlement. The railroads in turn sold the land to major corporate forestry, agribusiness, or mining interests.
Corporations combined this windfall with the proceeds of profiteering from the Civil War to create large pools of financial capital at a time when new energy technologies were coming online to substitute fossil fuels for the sheer muscle power of labor. The loss of jobs from this conversion combined with rapid population growth to create a significant labor surplus and a corresponding downward pressure on wages that further increased the profits and influence of the leading industrialists.
In 1860, the United States ranked fourth behind the United Kingdom, France, and Germany in the value of its manufacturing production. By 1894, it ranked number one, with an output of manufactured goods more than double that of the United Kingdom, its nearest rival. As industrial corporations became even more powerful, hopes for economic justice for the working class suffered a corresponding decline.19
Corporate leverage over workers was further increased by an economic recession that led to widespread joblessness and starvation. Employers imposed deep wage cuts that fanned growing resentment.
In 1877, the resentment culminated in the Great Railroad Strike. All across the country blacks and whites, women and men, joined in solidarity to block rail transport and shut down ports, shipping, and factories in what came close to a national strike. State and federal governments sided unerringly with the corporations. At the behest of the railroads, state militias were called out. When state militia units refused to fire on their neighbors, federal troops stepped in, firing on the crowds and making arrests until the plutocracy was firmly back in control.20 Once again, the federal troops were used to insure domestic tranquility as defined by the owning class. 209
True to the original intention, the courts sided with the owning class in case after case. The Supreme Court consistently upheld decisions of state courts that nullified laws limiting an employee’s hours of work, establishing a minimum wage, or otherwise restricting the rights of employers.21 In virtually every sector money power prevailed over people power. The opinion-making forces of the press, schools, and churches all aligned with the interests of money.22 The barons of wealth and Imperial Consciousness saw themselves as instruments of a great religious mission based on a Darwinian vision of human progress ordained by God. Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty sum it up:
The steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie wrote in 1889 that, “Individualism, Private Property, the Law of Accumulation of Wealth, and the Law of Competition” were “the highest result of human experience.” John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the oil and mining potentate, declared in a lecture to Sunday-school students: “The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest.… This is not an evil tendency in business… merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.” William Graham Sumner, Yale professor of political and social science and a favorite lapdog of the rich, opined that, “The millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement.”23
Millionaires built ostentatious mansions and summer homes modeled on European castles, while the less fortunate went homeless and scavenged for crumbs. The disdain of the powerful for the working class was exemplified by the famous boast of Jay Gould, whose empire included several steamship lines, the Western Union Telegraph Company, and a number of railroads: “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half,” he proclaimed.24 Gould may have been right about his half of the labor force, but the half he could not hire continued organizing with an impressive solidarity among men, women, whites, and blacks even in the face of violent repression by courts, private security guards, and federal troops.
As they had done following Bacon’s Rebellion, employers used every opportunity to exploit divisions between men and women, and between whites and blacks. Labor proved to be strongest when it succeeded in maintaining solidarity among working people across race, gender, and occupational lines. 210
Labor Populists versus Labor Plutocrats
The most powerful labor organization of the post–Civil War period was the Knights of Labor, formed in 1869 in Philadelphia as a secret organization of garment workers. Of a deeply inclusive populist persuasion, the Knights welcomed all “producing classes” to its membership, including housewives, farmers, clergymen, shopkeepers, and professionals. It even included employers if they had come from the wage-earning class and treated their workers fairly. Only corporate lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers, professional gamblers, and liquor dealers were excluded summarily. The Knights grew to be a significant force with a comprehensive agenda of reforms intended to transform the system, including a progressive income tax, the abolition of child labor, workers’ compensation, an eight-hour day, and public ownership of the railroads. It also embraced a program of economic democratization by organizing mines and factories as worker cooperatives.25
As economic conditions for labor deteriorated further, strikes became more frequent and the confrontations more violent. Police fired on strikers and arrested leaders. Four labor leaders were hanged based on what many believed to be trumped-up charges. The military and police firepower of the state ultimately restored domestic tranquility for the corporate robber barons. As the Knights faded into history, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged to take its place.26
The AFL, which was less expansive in its membership and more narrowly focused in its aims, was only interested in organizing skilled workers to win them a bigger piece of the pie through the negotiation of favorable contracts. It took no interest in less skilled workers, women, African Americans, and new immigrants or in matters of public policy.27
Whereas the Knights had more of the qualities of a self-organizing social movement, the AFL created an institutional superstructure of professional negotiators and organizers with a classic imperial gap between its own management and the rank-and-file workers it professed to serve. Functioning much like a corporation in the business of supplying contract labor to other corporations, AFL leaders were perfectly comfortable with the established system of power, moved easily within the circles of the plutocracy, and negotiated sweetheart deals with employers in return for bribes. With a substantial lock on worker access to jobs, the AFL’s membership grew rapidly from the 1890s through the first decade of the twentieth century, even as corporations continued to 211undermine union power and the Supreme Court continued to side with management.
In 1905, workers of a more radical political bent formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), as a counterforce to the AFL. In contrast to the AFL, which largely aligned itself with the capitalist cause, the declared mission of the IWW was to over
throw the capitalist system. Popularly known as the Wobblies, the IWW was at the center of labor activism in the early twentieth century. It catered to African Americans, unskilled workers, and new immigrants, pursued a broad agenda of social reform, and threatened the establishment. Its members hated the more conservative AFL almost as much as they hated capitalism.28
The labor unrest of this period built up to a massive 1913 mine-workers strike against the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, which ended in a major defeat for the workers when company guards and state militiamen fired on the strikers with machine guns and torched their tent colony. By the time the strikers returned to work, sixty-nine miners and family members had been murdered.29
Capitalist Excess and the Great Depression
In the 1920s, the Republican presidencies of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, backed by a Republican-controlled Congress, carried corporate influence over government to what for that time was a new extreme. The Harding administration was famous for graft and corruption, the fraudulent sale of government property, and the looting of Native American assets. Coolidge cut the income taxes of the rich in half and sharply reduced the inheritance tax. Hoover supported U.S. corporate expansion into foreign markets. These administrations promoted loans to foreign governments to create more markets for U.S. corporations and regularly fielded troops to protect overseas corporate investments in China, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua.30
Inequality grew rapidly in the 1920s. Privileged groups, including skilled workers in unionized trades, generally did well. Most working people, however, gained little or nothing from the burst of prosperity, and many workers suffered falling wages. Labor racketeering became well established in the building trades, and the Mafia took over some local unions to raid their treasuries and sell “strike insurance” to employers.31
Working people were not earning enough to buy the goods being produced by the overheated economy. Fraud and speculation were 212rampant in unregulated financial markets. The excesses of materialism, political corruption, speculation, and financial fraud could not be sustained. The illusion evaporated, and the nation was hit by the economic collapse of October 1929, which brought on the Great Depression.
A NEW DEAL
Elected by a landslide on a visionary reform platform, a New York patrician named Franklin D. Roosevelt took office as president on March 4, 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression. His proclaimed commitment was to save capitalism from itself. Immediately on taking office, he began implementing a program of regulatory reform to limit the worst excesses of capitalism and to revitalize the economy by putting more money in the hands of working people. He immediately tightened the public regulation of banks and financial markets, implemented employment-generating public works programs, funded relief programs that extended aid to a fifth of the national population, and pushed through legislation guaranteeing labor’s right to organize and bargain collectively.32 Roosevelt’s actions energized labor and appalled his peers, who denounced him as a class traitor.
Leveling the Playing Field
Although the federal government proved unable to enforce its own labor rights guarantees in the face of defiance by the corporate plutocrats, Roosevelt, unlike previous presidents, declined to send out troops to fight on the side of the corporations. That made all the difference. Union membership skyrocketed, and everywhere workers struck for better wages and working conditions.
Corporations responded by mobilizing support from hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan to “save America from labor radicals,” hired private goon squads to rough up union members, launched public relations campaigns to denounce labor organizers as Communists, and called on local police and national guard units to put down strikers. The excesses of the industrialists succeeded in swinging public sentiment in the favor of labor and strengthening Roosevelt’s political base and resolve.
In 1935, Roosevelt initiated the Second New Deal based on a partnership with workers. It included Social Security, national unemployment 213insurance, substantial tax increases for corporations and wealthy individuals, and antitrust action to break up corporate monopolies. Reelected with strong union support against a pro-business Republican in 1936, Roosevelt won over 60 percent of the popular vote and carried every state but Maine and Vermont. Aggressive organizing drives increased union membership from 3.6 million in 1935 to 8.7 million in 1940.
Right-wing sentiment surged in the 1938–40 period among corporate leaders, a number of whom expressed overt sympathy for German and Italian fascism. Henry Ford and James Watson (president of IBM) accepted Nazi medals. Major corporations formed the America First Committee to oppose intervention against Hitler. A former president of the National Association of Manufacturers suggested that “American business might be forced to turn to some form of disguised Fascist dictatorship,” and the association distributed two million copies of a pamphlet titled “Join the CIO and Help Build a Soviet America.”33
Middle-Class Ascendance
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise air attack on the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. A suddenly unified nation mobilized to defeat a common enemy. Pumping money into defense industries, it created the most powerful industrial and military force the world had ever known, paid for in part by raising marginal tax rates on the rich. The economy boomed, corporate profits soared on cost-plus government contracts, and widespread unemployment was replaced by critical labor shortages.
Unions generally lived by their pledge not to strike during the war but continued organizing. By 1945, union membership had risen to 14.3 million, which was 35.5 percent of the workforce.34 Following the war, the defense industries retooled for civilian production as pent-up consumer demand fueled the economy.
Backing their demands with a wave of strikes, labor pressed for and won major wage increases and brought working people more rights and benefits than they had enjoyed at any other time in U.S. history. Unions were strong. Health care and retirement benefits were pretty much a given for working people. The earnings of a typical wage earner were adequate to support a family, and working parents came home to have dinner with their children. Home ownership was growing, and 214everyone was capturing a portion of the gains from the increasing economic output—narrowing the wealth gap and decreasing the relative power of the plutocracy.35
The terms downsizing and outsourcing had not yet entered the vocabulary. The American Dream of comfortable affluence continued to elude people of color, but for most Americans of European descent, it had become a reality.
The United States became the envy of the world and the model that others sought to emulate at a time when, in the world at large, the great colonial empires of the past were being dismantled. People everywhere were demanding a democratic voice and a fair share of the wealth they helped to create. For a time it seemed the entire world might eventually enjoy a level of affluence comparable to that of the American middle class.
The ideals set forth in the stirring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, the founding of the United States and the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution did not bring democracy to North America. Rather, it created a context for a long struggle to overcome an inherited cultural and institutional legacy of five thousand years of Empire—a struggle violently opposed by the elites in power. The historical reality of the genocide against Native Americans, the enslavement of blacks, the denial of the basic rights and humanity of women, and the denial of a just share of profits to those who toil to make capital productive manifests this legacy, underscores the magnitude of the challenge, and reveals how much remains undone.
It is only from a deeper historical perspective that we can appreciate the substantial accomplishments of these struggles. Monarchy is now little more than a historical curiosity. A clear separation of church and state secures freedom of religious conscience and worship. A system of checks and balances has for over two centuries successfully barred one elite faction from establishi
ng permanent control of the institutions of government. Active genocide against Native Americans has ended and genocide against any group is now universally condemned. Slavery is no longer a legally protected institution and is culturally unacceptable. 215
Native Americans, people of color, people without property, and women now all have the legal right to vote and to participate fully in the political process. Pervasive though it remains in practice, open discrimination to deny the political rights of any group is now culturally unacceptable.
The fact that we now take these accomplishments for granted underscores how significant our progress has been, given that not so long ago they would have been considered unthinkable. Each of these achievements depended on the sustained commitment and sacrifice of millions of extraordinary people committed to a vision of a world that works for all.
Many of us who grew up in the United States in the post–World War II years came to accept democracy and economic justice as something of an automatic birthright. We were raised to believe that we were blessed to live in a classless society of opportunity for all who are willing to apply themselves and play by the rules.
The experience of the middle class in those years seemed to confirm this story, and those of us who were a part of it were inclined to dismiss people who spoke of issues of class as malcontents who would rather promote class warfare than accept responsibility for putting in an honest day’s work. Sure, there had been problems in the past, but thanks to our intellectual genius and high ideals, we Americans had resolved them and rendered them irrelevant to our present. Now it was our due and our responsibility to make the rest of the world more like us. I now recognize how wrong we were.
The Great Turning Page 26