THE MACHINE AGE

1877-1920

• The villages and farms of antebellum America increasingly gave way to cities and factories

• From 1870 to 1900 the portion of agricultural workers fell from 53% to 37% of the workforce

• Americans who left the farms to live in cities were joined by another massive stream: the “New Immigrants” from eastern and southern Europe (primarily Catholics and Jews)

• By 1900, 40% of residents lived in a place of 2,500 people or more: Americans were massing in compact areas on an unprecedented scale

• There is no sine qua non link between cities and factories

• Early mills had been located along sources of water power, chiefly rivers: towns had then gradually grown around the mill

• After the Civil War the trend became massing population, production, and consumption in cities: each reinforced the other

• Technological innovations were indispensable to this linkage

• Earlier American urban areas were termed “walking cities” as their size and scope was limited to the distance inhabitants could travel on foot (often a radius of about two miles)

URBAN TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION• First came the horse-drawn omnibus, little more than a

stagecoach, introduced in New York in 1827• By the mid 19th century horse drawn trolleys were competing

with the omnibus in may eastern cities• The 1886 harnessing of electric power allowed great dynamos to

propel several cars simultaneously along the same track • Leading to urban transport augmentations and breakthroughs

such as the “EL” in Chicago (monorail), the cable cars in San Francisco and Chicago (1873) and, by the turn of the century, the subway in New York and other cities

• Together, these greatly expanded the horizontality of the emerging industrial cities, while providing many jobs to the builders and staffers of the systems

• Cities could thus expand outward as commuting distances steadily increased

“EL” IN CHICAGO

CHICAGO CABLE CAR

TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION

NYC SUBWAY STATION

BUILDING THE SUBWAY

SUBWAY CONSTRUCTION

• The steam engines (circa 1850), powered by America’s abundant coal deposits, now allowed factories to escape river proximity, and, coupled with the electricity to power transportation systems and light homes, streets, and factories, also pulled industries into urban settings

• Existing cities also enjoyed the inherent advantage of already having centralized access to capital and labor

• Eastern cities began to specialize in producing consumer staples and heavy industrial items

• Midwestern centers like Chicago on processing agricultural goods, and western urban areas focused on extracting and refining minerals and lumber

PRE-INDUSTRIAL WORKPLACE• REFER TO YOUR NOTES OF OUR IN-CLASS

DISCUSION ON THIS TOPIC

PRE-INDUSTRIAL ARTISAN WORKSHOP

PRE-INDUSTRIAL SHOEMAKER’S WORKSHOP

PRE-INDUSTRIAL WATER MILL

MILL NEAR A RIVER

EARLY FACTORY

NEW INDUSTRIAL FACTORY• Increasingly loud, frenetic, crowded, ill-lit and ventilated with machine-

tending workers ever more stripped of individuality, creativity, self-esteem, and dignity

• Increased competition, in part a result of the railroad’s ability to facilitate mass-marketing, drove owners to impose discipline, efficiency, and long hours for low pay on a work force that was tied to immigration

• Factories and immigrants were often the anchor of the city centers while the new transport networks allowed those succeeding in the emerging business opportunities of the industrial economy (“middle classes”) to live in ever-growing rings outward from the center

• Businessmen in the cities could easily recruit labor to tend the machines because factory work demanded no particular skills

• As the owners deployed workers and arranged the work into ever more specific, repetitive tasks

• Machine-made shoes, tended by up to fifty workmen trained to do only one part of the process, could now be completed at the rate of eighty per hour, as opposed to one hand-made pair per hour

• Loss of control by the workers of the production process

Cont…• Power over the machines allowed management

to restructure social relations• A much greater gap came about between the

low paid, unskilled workers on the plant floor and the management team that directed the factory (hourly vs. salaried employees)

• Reliance on machines required rigid disciplining of the workforce through adherence to fixed schedules of time and duties…disappearing was the quiet and relaxed atmosphere of the pre-machine workshop

1886 Mc CORMICK STRIKE• McCormick retaliated against a unionized iron

molders strike that had succeeded the previous year by importing $500,000 worth of pneumatic molding machinery

• Thus stripping the skilled iron molders of any leverage in negotiations: these new machines were tended by easily replaced, much less-skilled men who could now get the job done (all 91 members of the iron molders union were fired)

• Increasingly, leverage and power in the industrial age were on the side of management

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT• The basic principles were established by Frederick W. Taylor in

the late 19th century• Taylor separated the thinking and doing of work, something

that could now be done thanks to the increasing use of machines (that stripped workers of power and leverage in the workplace)

• His clipboard-toting assistants visited a factory and, through rigorous observation of time and motion studies of the workers on the job, recommended the elimination of about half the present work force

• Management at that factory would also thus know what the workers had always known: how to do the job-salaried overseers could now tell workers all they needed to know to perform their specific task in the larger production process

• The implications for labor were chilling

TAYLOR AND TIME MANAGEMENT

Cont…• Taylor’s men found wasted motion, improper

tools, overstaffing, and reported on these happenings to the owners

• Those workers who survived the draconian cuts in the factory workforce would find themselves doing the work of two or even three former employees

• Turning men into robots of a sort

THE NEW IMMIGRANTS• Eastern US cities grew in tandem with the

rapid pace of in-migration from southern and eastern Europe after 1880

• Almost 80% of the population of Chicago and New York in 1900 were foreign born or their children (first and second generation)

• Growing cities created a voracious demand for labor: municipal services, streets, sewers, schools, hospitals, and transportation systems that needed to be built from scratch: all of which multiplied the need for unskilled labor, a vacuum filled by the New Immigrants

ELLIS ISLAND, NYC

ELLIS ISLAND, INTERIOR

ARRIVAL AT ELLIS ISLAND

Cont…• At least 25% of arriving immigrants returned to their

nations of origin and did not remain in the US• By 1910 the immigration service identified 60% of the

New Immigrants as “laborers” or “servants”• For many the hard edge of desperation propelled them

outward from Europe (lack of available farmland, hunger, fear of conscription, anti-Semitic pogroms, poverty)

• By 1910 they were 70% of all immigrant to the US: they saw opportunity as day laborers and unskilled factory workers in the US

• Whenever possible the native-born shunned such jobs• Furthermore, many who out-migrated from Europe went

elsewhere: Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Australia

ETHNIC CONCENTRATIONS• Various immigrant groups also gravitated toward or were pigeonholed

into certain jobs• Jew often gravitated to the ready-made clothing industry• Irish dominated many eastern police forces• Eastern Europeans were typecast as physical strong by stupid and

plodding• Italians were stereotyped as well-suited for street labor and

construction gangs• Many new arrivals from Europe gravitated to neighborhoods already

well populated by kin or residents of home districts from the old country

• In Kansas City, Missouri two-thirds of the Italians came from Sicily• Newcomers often found work at nearby factories or jobsites where

family and neighbors were already employed: an informal ethnic beachhead

• Newcomers usually were given the lowest-paying, most physically demanding jobs

Cont…• Handicapped by low wages, many were

forced into crowded, ill-lit and poorly ventilated tenement slum conditions such as the lower east side of New York

• Often located near the factory district in a given industrial city, with the accompanying stench and smoke adding to their discomfort

• Most did not earn enough to afford the one-way nickel fare on the urban transport systems

TENEMENT SLUM HOUSING

TENEMENT INTERIOR

NEW YORK, THE “FIVE POINTS”

TENEMENT EXTERIORS

TENEMENT NEIGHBORHOOD

• The streets of tenement neighborhoods were often crowded by those seeking to escape the stench, crowding, and claustrophobia of the dank interior rooms

• What one saw and heard on these streets became a primary form of entertainment for those too poor to afford the theater or concert halls

• The Bowery Boys

BOWERY BOYS

Cont…

CRIME IN INDUSTRIAL CITIES

A EUROPEAN INVENTION

INDUSTRIAL ERA POLICE FORCE• A trend borrowed by Americans from Paris and

London• The industrial age created ever larger gaps between

the emerging social classes• An increasingly materialistic culture, right under the

noses of the poor, drove some to theft and property crimes, in turn frightening the growing middle class

• The thriving middle class were willing to pay taxes to create a buffer between themselves and the newspapers described as the “dangerous classes” (the urban poor and struggling)

Cont…• Irish-Americans were the logical group to

predominate in urban-industrial police forces• Many Irish had emigrated to the US a

generation or two earlier• They spoke English• They were white• They had a reputation for toughness (the

“paddy wagon”)• A gigantic step up the class ladder from the

days of “Irish need not apply”

POLICEMAN ON HIS BEAT

Cont…

THE MIDDLE CLASS BUFFER

FAILED FARMERS• Many who had embraced the Jeffersonian vision

of virtue, independence, and liberty through farm ownership eventually gave in, exhausted from the unrelenting toil and harsh winters, as well as the inherent loneliness and isolation that accompanied living in rural America, as well as the drought and insects

• Their subsequent in-migration to the new industrial cities was speeded by the deployment of farm machines like the individual atop a McCormick reaper that could do the work of twenty men with harvesting sickles

EARLY MCCORMICK REAPER

ISOLATION IN THE WEST

FAILED FARMERS

Cont…• They enjoyed a significant advantage over

the New Immigrants streaming in from eastern and southern Europe: most were native born Protestant Americans who understood the culture and spoke English

• Many, however, were initially ill-equipped for the wrenching transition from farm life with its rhythm of the seasons, outdoor work, relative autonomy, and control of one’s time into the rigid discipline of factory life and the tyranny of Taylor’s time clock, coupled with urban crowding and diversity

INDUSTRIALIZING AMERICA

• 1870-1900: the capital invested in manufacturing increased six-fold

• Quantum jump in steel production from 1867 to 1900: 19,000 tons to 10 million tons

• Both are indicators of the US surge to world industrial standing

• Steel (1857 Bessemer process) replaced iron and wood as the main component in US machinery (harder and with much greater tensile strength)

• Now rails, nails, beams, plate, wire and tubing were all made of steel: the price dropped to $12 a ton by the late 1890s (from $50 in 1875)

• By 1900, 1500 factories had payrolls of over 500 workers

• Eleven of the sixteen largest industries doubled in size, 1870-1900

• Steel, in conjunction with steam power and electricity changed the face of the US

• The Brooklyn Bridge (essay in Portraits)• City buildings could now soar vertically thanks

to skeletons of steel I-beam, balloon-frame construction

• The meat-packing industry was revolutionized by the invention of the refrigerated railroad car

BALLOON-FRAME CONSTRUCTION

STEEL-FRAME CONSTRUCTION

REFRIGERATED RAILROAD CARS

• Brought an enormous improvement to the American diet

• Revolutionized the cattle ranching and meat-packing industries

• Made the railroad even more important in American life

• Helped create fortunes for the two giants in the meat-packing field: Philip Armour and Gustavus Swift

DIAGRAM

REFRIGERATED RAILROAD CAR

VERTICAL INTEGRATION• Pioneered (but not invented) by Swift and his

meat company in the late 19th century• Take control of very aspect of the raw material

acquisition, manufacturing and distribution process in which your company engages = EFFICIENCY AND CONTROL + ECONOMY OF SCALE

• Swift bought the cattle ranches and employed the cowboys/owned the railcars that brought the beef to the Swift slaughterhouses, and owned as well the refrigerated railroad cars and, later, trucks that transported the cuts of meats to stores and markets

ECONOMY OF SCALE• “the more you buy, the less you pay”• Which gave the larger businesses and

corporations a distinct advantage in under-pricing competitors and driving them out of the marketplace, thus capturing a greater market share for themselves

• Shipping in bulk also induced railroads to transport your product more cheaply per unit, thus also lowering costs

• Walmart and Crest toothpaste• Purchasing group medical insurance for

employees

GUSTAVUS SWIFT

REFRIGERATED SWIFT RAILCAR

1906 FEDERAL MEAT INSPECTORS

HORIZONTAL INTEGRATION• Pioneered by John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil• Seizing control of ever greater market share within your

field is the goal of this monopolistic strategy• Accomplished by driving competitors out of the

marketplace, using vertical integration and lowball pricing, sometimes ruthless tactics, and/or buying them out (economy of scale a large key)

• Rockefeller owned all the pipelines that carried the unrefined oil: the size of his growing control of oil won rebates from railroads (economy of scale) which gave him an additional pricing advantage over competitors

• Rockefeller at his peak controlled about 87% of the petroleum market, the closest any horizontal integration has come to a pure monopoly

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER

STANDARD OIL

STANDARD OIL

CORPORATIONS• They further revolutionized the industrial age in

several important ways• Essentially the modern corporation was born with

the transfer of several heretofore individual rights and immunities to large business entities

• In the process corporations gained the freedom from external regulation and control that was originally the hallmark of republican liberty in Jefferson’s America

• Jefferson had argued that individual economic independence and the sanctity of private property, free of intrusion by government or other individuals, were essential to liberty

Cont…• Ironically, by granting these long-cherished

individual rights to companies, a majority of Americans lost basic freedoms so dear to Jefferson’s generation

• As an increasing number of Americans were now dependent on someone else for their livelihood

• They also became increasingly subjected to the hierarchical rules and nondemocratic controls of the corporations and large businesses for which they worked as the corporations secured the rights long established to insure the freedom of individuals against concentrated government power

LEGAL FOUNDATIONS• Gradually shifting legal doctrines, emerging

from common law protection of farmers, evolved to encourage capital accumulation, risk taking, and economic growth

• By the 1820s courts were dismissing lawsuits filed by farmers whose lands had been flooded by the actions of mill owners, with judges presuming society’s “greater good” was served by businesses rather than individuals

• Gradually eroding the tenets of the Moral Economy that had guided Europe since the Middle Ages (common good over private gain)

Cont…• With the rise of the Market Economy views of the economic sphere

emerged stressing fluctuating prices according to supply and demand, as well as applauding speculative commercial ventures and future’s trading in crops and animals

• In other words, the new wisdom in the business world stressed that prices and values were inherently subjective

• Contracts, thanks to the Marshall and Tawney Supreme Courts, were now governed by the will of the parties and were considered binding regardless of any perceived unfairness or inequality in the agreement

• In 1837 Tawney had freed a newer company from the monopolistic claims of an older corporation in the Charles River Bridge case, encouraging open competition and spurring the creation of new businesses and competition

• Andrew Jackson had typified the beliefs of many anti-corporate Democrats in decrying such decisions, while their Whig opponents, embracers of the market economy, cheered

SUPREME COURT, CONT…• Individual state legislatures passed laws in the latter

half of the 19th century, that effectively functioned as tariffs, in an effort to favor local and in-state merchants and manufacturers over outside competitors who could now much more easily access national markets via the railroad

• The Supreme Court, in a series of rulings in the late 19th century, overturned these state statutes, citing the inter-state commerce clause in the Constitution, thus completely a national marketplace free of local restrictions and advantages

• Thus, the Industrial Revolution was accompanied by an agricultural revolution, a judicial revolution, and a market revolution that created a “common market”

Cont…• The amount of capital needed and the scope of

activities of the emerging corporations were unprecedented by 1900

• As was the flow of information needed to run a corporation in a changing marketplace

• Resulting in bureaucratic and hierarchical corporate structures that resembled a military culture with its chain of command, flowing downward and outward from central offices

• Railroads pioneered this “militarization” as well as eliminating the old “barriers to bigness” presented by time and distance

ADVERTISING REVOLUTION• James B. Duke (yes, the university) led the

American Tobacco Company as it pioneered mass production via machines that could turn out 100,000 cigarettes per day in 1881

• Faced with over-production Duke created mass marketing advertising techniques that at first were ridiculed by his CEO peers in the corporate world

• The thought of plowing up to 1/3 of company profits into convincing Americans to buy one’s product seemed laughable if not foolhardy, as that money, CEOs argued, should rightly go to stockholders in the form of dividends that would also shore up the company’s Wall Street share price

Cont…• But Duke’s approach to marketing gradually

won over other corporate leaders as they came to realize that mass production could only succeed in tandem with mass marketing

• With increasing mass production fueled by machines corporate leaders also understood that production costs must be shaved to the bone

• Like Duke they sought to sell millions of units of their products with bare-bones profit per item (instead of making a million on one sale you instead make a dollar on each of a million sales)

DUKE

POOLS• Business leaders within a given industry, despite public

pronouncements about competition and the virtues of free enterprise, sought to mitigate the damaging effects of vicious competition and the discipline of the market by creating pools

• Pools, entered into voluntarily by the top several companies in a given industry, fostered cooperative agreements on pricing, production, regional market allocations, and wages, as well as passing on information about potential union activists

• They often broke down, however, as individual companies were also under pressure from stockholders to increase profits by growing their market share

• Also, they could not be enforced because they were not legally enforceable as the Congress passed bills like the Sherman Anti-Trust Act

TRUSTS• John D. Rockefeller saw the inherent weakness

of pools• His chief lawyer, Samuel Dodd, dug up an old

business tactic in which an individual was allowed to manage the financial affairs of someone unwilling or unable to handle them himself

• Dodd in 1887 saw the possibilities for horizontal integration via a trust if the stockholders of smaller oil companies could be persuaded or bullied into yielding control of their stock to the Board of Trustees of Standard Oil

HOLDING COMPANIES• Trusts, however, became a moot point the next year

when New Jersey, anxious to attract corporations to their state, passed new laws allowing corporations chartered there to own property in other states as well as stock in out-of-state companies

• Trusts had not allowed for ownership, only “trusteeship”• Thus opening the way for the creation of New Jersey

chartered “holding companies,” many of which over time owned no corporate assets except the stock of other companies

• Thereby allowing one corporation to control the actions of many businesses by acquiring majority interests in them through stock purchases and stashing that stock in holding companies

Cont…• Holding companies could also be used to

vertically integrate, as Gustavus Swift was doing in the meat industry

• By buying up cattle ranches and pig farms, as well as purchasing the railroad cars on which the meat was transported and, later, owning the trucks in which the processed meat was sent to retail outlets like grocery stores

• Subsidiary companies controlled by Swift were created to manage each of these interrelated parts of the operation

FINANCIERS• Acted as “marriage-brokers” or middlemen in

the financial arena for the many “mergers and acquisitions” that took place toward the end of the 19th century and beyond

• Bringing together firms that needed capital with those that had large sums to lend or invest

• And extracting a small percentage fee for their services (1% of a million dollar transaction is $10,000, barely noticeable, but by the end of the year you have made a fortune)

JAY GOULD

J. P. MORGAN

SOCIAL DARWINISM• A notion first coined in England by the philosopher

Herbert Spencer• Its foremost American champion was the Yale professor

William Graham Sumner• Its proponents linked Darwin’s theory of the survival of

the fittest with the prevailing laissez faire principles trumpeted by business and corporate leaders

• To justify the great and growing gaps between rich (WASPS) and the (immigrant) poor

• And to legitimize the notion that wealth flows naturally to the superior and the elite

• Monopolies, therefore, were beneficial in that control lay in the hands of the “fittest”

SPENCER/SUMNER

GOSPEL OF WEALTH• An argument put forward by the immigrant

industrialist Andrew Carnegie: philanthropy• He argued for the validity of Social Darwinism but

added the idea that the elite who gained wealth had a duty to society to give back

• By creating cultural, artistic, and literary monuments for public use and edification: parks, libraries, concert halls, universities

• Was he goaded late in life by his nagging Scottish Presbyterian conscience?

• Never did he advocate raising the wages of the exploited working class

ANDREW CARNEGIE

GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE TO BUSINESS

• Just as business leaders in the industrial age publicly trumpeted rugged individualism while privately creating pools, trusts, and holding companies to minimize competition

• So they also readily accepted numerous forms of government help in creating and growing their businesses

• Tariff policies kept out European competitors and allowed American firms to raise prices

• Railroads had benefitted greatly from generous land subsidies

• The US Post Office carried corporate correspondence• US patent laws safeguarded the profits from the inventions

created by corporate scientists

LESTER WARD• The university champion of the new academic

discipline of Sociology that was becoming the rage on college campuses among those seeking reform of the system

• Ward argued that progress of civilization came from human control of nature, not natural selection

• He further suggested that humans are the product of their environment, that they are shaped by their surroundings (casting doubt on Social Darwinism

• For Ward, ethics was more important than exploitive profits and laissez faire

• He decried the brutal excesses of the Industrial Age as wasteful and obscene

LESTER WARD

HENRY GEORGE• A social reformer and economist whose book “Progress

and Poverty” sold more copies in the US in the 1880s than any other publication save the Bible

• George was appalled at the great disparity between rich and poor in the industrial age

• He advocated a “single tax” on all owned land in the US equal to its rental value: doing this, he argued, would obviate the need for any other tax, leaving America with a “single tax”

• Workers could thus keep all their hard-earned wages• He saw land as a gift from God, not a man-made creation• He became so popular in New York city that he defeated

Theodore Roosevelt while finishing 2nd in the city’s mayoral election

EDWARD BELLAMY• A socialist who believed that the lustful drive for profit and

property lay at the root of American society’s increasing ills in the Industrial Age

• Argued in his utopian novel “Looking Backwards” that the only way out of this morass lay in government ownership of all means of production and vital industries, thus removing the profit motive that turned men into ravaging beasts

• And evolving America into an egalitarian and just society based on brotherhood and fair play that Bellamy labeled Nationalism

• Because American citizens chose the government leaders, in reality, the people not the plutocrats would own the companies, businesses, and utilities

BELLAMY/”LOOKING BACKWARD”

E.C. KNIGHT CASE• Corporate friendly senators had succeeded in

watering down the Sherman Anti-Trust bill and knew that its enforcement lay with pro-business federal judges

• The EC Knight case came about through legal challenges to the “Sugar Trust” which had come to dominate the American sugar-refining industry

• The Supreme Court embraced a literal meaning of the Constitution’s “interstate commerce” clause, and ruled that Congress could only regulate trade, not manufacturing, which they deemed an entirely different activity not covered by the Framers

Cont…• Only a handful of prosecutions under the

Sherman bill took place in the decade after its passage

• Ironically, the pro-business courts interpreted the famous “restraint of trade” phrase in the bill to curb the power of labor unions, something its congressional creators had never intended

CLERICAL REVOLUTION• Business paperwork in the antebellum arena had been done

by the ink-stained fingers of male scriveners (Herman Melville)• Their ranks had shrunk drastically by the early 20th century,

replaced by young, single women with enough trade school education to effectively use the latest business innovations: the typewriter, cash register, and adding machine

• Corporations increasingly relied on these women because they could pay them less than men, they were viewed as more tractable, and, with the strong societal pressure on women to marry and “find their true calling” as wives and mothers, they were short-term employers who would not unionize

• Nevertheless, a big step up for young single, modestly educated American women mired in the expectations of the “velvet cage” of domesticity

CLERICAL REVOLUTION

Cont…• In 1880 4% of clerical jobs were staffed by

females…in 1920 nearly half were• A significant step up from factory or servant

work for the daughters of the New Immigrants in becoming secretaries and shop girls

• Discrimination was the norm as women were seldom entrusted with cash and were paid wages lower than men

CHILD LABOR• In 1890 over 18% of children outside the farm sector

were employed, especially in the textile and shoe industries

• They were paid a fraction of adult wages, saving the company money by reducing production costs

• Several northern states passed laws regulating child labor abuses, but the courts ruled that large firms, engaged in interstate commerce, were exempt from state regulation

• Poor parents, desperate for extra family income, complicated the situation by misleading the authorities about the age of their children

• Compulsory school laws put a dent in child labor

ANTI-CHILD LABOR CARTOON

INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENTS• The number of injuries, maimings, and deaths

rose steadily in America’s Industrial Age, peaking at hundreds of thousands per year around 1920

• In 1913 industrial accidents killed 25,000 and left an additional one million hurt

• In an era with no disability insurance for doctor visits, or to replace lost incomes

• Prevailing free market views impeded the passage of laws in this area

LABOR REFORM EFFORTS• Variations on the allegations of Malthusian

theory and Ricardo’s “iron law of wages”• If wages rise the number of people seeking

the jobs will increase, creating a glut of workers and driving wages back down, using basic supply and demand principles

• Therefore, why bother to give wage increases in the first place?

• Especially with the massive influx of New Immigrants creating an “excess labor pool”

CHILD LABOR

TROOPS CONFRONTING STRIKERS

HENRY FORD• Linked individualism and materialism through the assembly

line and Fordism• His creation of the auto assembly line greatly increased

production by bringing the evolving “Model T” to the stationary workers

• The assembly line work was often boring and repetitive: Ford decided to pay these workers the then outrageous wage of five dollars per day

• His corporate peers sneered at such largesse, but Ford replied that his workers would all run out and buy a Ford automobile

• Thus making an important contribution to modern American consumerism and demand-side economics: without well-compensated workers manufacturers cannot produce and make profits

DU PONTS: CHEMICALS• Although Germany as a nation took the lead in

the chemical field the foremost American family in this areas was the Du Ponts

• They feared that the family’s long-term domination of the gunpowder industry in the US could be threatened by anti-trust laws

• And so branched out into the broader chemical market, producing fertilizers, dyes, photographic film, rubber, lacquer, and plastics

• All the while pioneering modern management tactics and strategies

SUPREME COURT AND LABOR• In Holden v. Hardy, 1896, the Court denied the

plaintiffs’ claims that their 14th Amendment rights were being violated and upheld a Utah law limiting the workday of miners there to eight hours, on the grounds that the work was inherently dangerous and unhealthy

• In Lockner v. New York, 1905, the Court by a narrow 5 to 4 vote reached a very different decision in a case involving the ten work day and sixty hour , work week of bakers, on the grounds that such work posed no inherent danger to employees, thus ruling against the bakers’ 14th Amendment claims and in favor of “liberty of contract”

Cont…• In Muller v. Oregon, 1908 the Supreme Court

for the first time accepted sociological evidence before rendering its decision (the famous Brandeis Brief)

• They found unanimously that female laundresses could not be compelled to work more than ten hours per day

• Largely for sexist reasons as longer hours might have an adverse affect on maternity

• A victory for labor but the decision was later interpreted to bar women from certain jobs on account of their “weaker” nature

RAILROAD STRIKE OF 1877

• See the Walter Licht essay in Interpretations

STRIKERS DESTROYING THE RAILS

TROOPS IN BALTIMORE SHOOT STRIKERS, 1877

KNIGHTS OF LABOR• See the Walter Licht essay in Interpretations• The leader of this union, Terrence Powderly, named them “knights” in an

attempt to rekindle the status, self-esteem, and relative income of skilled craftsmen in the Middle Ages that was being eroded in the Industrial Age

• Powderly divided the world into those who earn a living by honest toil and the sweat of their brow, and the leaches who exploited noble working people while acquiring the bulk of available assets and money (“an injury to one is a concern to all”)

• He therefore allowed any working person into the Knights (including women, blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants): an incredibly radical idea for its time

• They were not able to overcome middle class fears and misperceptions, and disappeared in the wake of the 1886 Haymarket Affair

KNIGHTS OF LABOR SEAL

POWDERLY ENCOURAGES BROTHERHOOD

HAYMARKET AFFAIR, 1886• Grew out of European labor-inspired May Day parades and

celebrations in Chicago• A few extremist anarchists (those who advocate complete

individual freedom and believe governments must be eliminated, violently if necessary) exploded bombs at the event

• Bringing in the police who brutally dispersed the demonstrators, killing several

• The Knights were blamed despite a lack of any real evidence, and several leaders were convicted at trial

• Middle class fear and anger with the sea of immigrants helped set the stage for this tragedy, as did a rejection of all things European like May Day, and the growing class tensions emerging in the Industrial Age

BI-LINGUAL HANDBILL

POLICE SHOOTING DEMONSTRATORS

POLICE BREAK UP SPEECHES

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR• Use the Walter Licht essay in Interpretations• Really more of an “umbrella organization” of several unions of skilled men (we

support Capitalism while seeking a larger slice of the pie)• Their charismatic leader, Samuel Gompers, stressed “bread and butter” issues:

higher wages, safer factories, health insurance, and collective bargaining• Gompers also emphasized a non-partisan approach to the two dominant

political parties, promising to throw the voting strength of the AF of L to the party that would do the most for labor

• Gompers also stressed the creation of a strong strike fund to use as a weapon at the bargaining table to win concessions in negotiations with owners and management

• Finally, Gompers rejected the Knights all-encompassing strategy and only allowed skilled white men to join: they were much less easily replaced in the event of a strike

SAMUEL GOMPERS

FUNERAL OF GOMPERS

HOMESTEAD STRIKE, 1892

• Use web research to understand this event

HOMESTEAD STRIKE

HOMESTEAD

POLICE AND STRIKERS

PULLMAN STRIKE, 1894

• Use web research to understand this event

PULLMAN STRIKE

INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD• The most radical of the labor unions of the Industrial Age: they

supported violence if necessary to topple the System (ruthlessly exploitive Big Business and the courts and politicians who did their bidding)

• And replace it with worker-dominated network of production and distribution of goods and services in which the wage structure would be eliminated

• Rejected the “failures” of the AF of L which, by the founding of the “Wobblies” in 1905 had only unionized 5% of workers in America

• “an injury to one is an injury to all” (a worker solidarity slogan that went beyond the Knights)

• Gompers saw the AF of L as top down culture in which leaders bargained with management for the workers

• While “Big Bill” Haywood and other Wobbly spokesmen emphasized a bottom-up structure in which workers as a group would assume control of factories

IWW MARTYR

IWW

FROM THE BOTTOM UP

“BIG BILL” HAYWOOD

Cont…• Clearly their radical strategy and occasionally

violent tactics terrified the middle and upper classes

• The beginning of the end for Wobblies began in World War I when the union refused to sanction either US participation in the conflict or the draft:

• why should good working men, the Wobblies argued, be compelled to murder brother working men from other countries so that the rich could grow richer by supplying them with the guns to bring about their destruction?)

TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FIRE, 1913

• Use your in-class notes from the film to understand this tragic moment in both labor and gender history

CLOCKING IN: TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST

FALLING BODIES

TRIANGLE TRAGEDY: RUINS

MAKESHIFT MORGUE

UNIONS FOR WOMEN

• Use Norton, 495-496