B005HFI0X2 EBOK (21 page)

The American Federation of Labor, led by British-born Samuel Gompers, who began as a worker in the cigar-making industry, presented itself as a moderate alternative to anticapitalist extremism. The AFL sought to organize only members of particular crafts, not all workers. Following its founding in 1886, the AFL grew to around 250,000 by 1892. Of these, 24,000 members belonged to its Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Gompers believed that the union movement should concentrate on obtaining higher wages for its members, not on broad political or social reform. Asked by a member of Congress what labor wanted, Gompers said: “More!”

Business and government were horrified by would-be industrial unions associated with radical politics, like the Industrial Workers of the World, the “Wobblies,” particularly during the Red Scare in the United States that followed the communist takeover in Russia in October 1917. But the more conservative craft unions of Gompers’s AFL were rejected by most American employers as well.

CLASS WARFARE

Labor violence was particularly intense in the railroad industry and in the new mass-production industries of the Steam Age.

In 1892, with the backing of Carnegie, who was vacationing in Britain, Henry Clay Frick locked out striking workers at the Homestead plant near Pittsburgh and fortified the steelworks, creating what some called “Fort Frick.” When Frick brought in armed Pinkerton detectives to guard the steel mill, nine strikers and seven guards were killed in a twelve-hour battle. To escort replacement workers or “scabs” into the mills, the governor of Pennsylvania sent the state national guard. The strike collapsed, and the workers who were not purged worked for less pay, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Carnegie’s reputation was permanently stained by the incident. Frick, who was shot and wounded by an anarchist but recovered, eventually became his bitter enemy, passing along a message in his old age to his former partner Carnegie: “I’ll see you in hell.”
⁵²

In May 1894, thousands of workers for the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike to protest wage cuts that followed the Panic of 1893. Led by Eugene V. Debs, the American Railway Union called on workers to refuse to work with trains that used Pullman cars. The attorney general of the United States, Richard Olney, who also happened to be general counsel for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway, obtained an injunction against the strikers from a federal court, and President Cleveland ordered the US Army and US marshals to end the strike. By the time the conflict ended, thirteen strikers were dead and widespread damage to property had occurred. Radicalized by his arrest and imprisonment, Debs went on to run for president five times as the leader of the Socialist Party of America.
⁵³

Following the Civil War, there was a class war and the capitalists won. They won with the help of not only the national guard and the Pinkerton detective agency but also of the federal judiciary, which allowed the Sherman Act to be used to prosecute labor unions.
⁵⁴
When Progressives in Congress enacted the Clayton Act of 1914 to exempt unions from antitrust laws as long as they engaged in nonviolent activity, federal judges interpreted the Clayton Act to permit even more injunctions to be used against labor unions than before.
⁵⁵
By 1900, organized labor in any form was marginalized.

AMERICA’S INTERNAL EMPIRE: THE SOUTH AND WEST

Other than replacing Britain as the informal hegemon of Central America and the Caribbean and acquiring some Pacific island bases that could serve as coaling stations for the US Navy and American trading vessels, the United States engaged in less imperialism than the other major powers. It did not need to. America had an internal empire. The people of the South, white and black alike, provided a captive consumer market for the manufactured goods of the factories in the Northeast and Midwest, and the mines of Appalachia and the sparsely settled West and later the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma supplied the industry of the American industrial core region with cheap and abundant ore, coal, and oil. The integrated northeastern-midwestern industrial complex was a nation within a nation, the equivalent of Britain or Germany or France. The South and West were America’s India and Africa and Central Asia.
⁵⁶

In the 1870s, the North abandoned its effort to restructure southern society. Federal troops were pulled out of the South following the Compromise of 1877. The desire of the northeastern bankers, the prewar allies of the South, for a rapid resumption of exports of cotton picked by a subservient labor force was fulfilled. The interests of most white and black southerners alike were sacrificed to a bargain between northern and southern elites, which granted the southern elite freedom to deal with its regional labor force as it pleased, in return for the South’s position as an internal resource colony and market for northern industry.

The South’s share of US wealth shrank from 30 percent to 12 percent between 1860 and 1870.
⁵⁷
By 1880, the gap in per capita wealth between the North and South was comparable to that between Germany and Russia.
⁵⁸
Many of the profits from southern agriculture, timber, and mining flowed out of the region to investors in the North and Britain. Southerners subsidized northerners by consumption of northern-made goods protected by high tariffs and by their taxes, which paid for pensions for Union war veterans from which Confederate veterans were excluded.

“I attended a funeral once in Pickens county in my State,” wrote Henry Grady, a prominent Southern newspaper editor. “This funeral was peculiarly sad. It was a poor ‘one gallus’ fellow, whose breeches struck him under the armpits and hit him at the other end about the knee—he didn’t believe in decollete clothes. They buried him in the midst of a marble quarry: they cut through solid marble to make his grave; and yet a little tombstone they put above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet the pine coffin was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine, and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that dug his grave were imported from Pittsburg. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing country on the earth, and yet the wool in the coffin bands and the coffin bands themselves were brought from the North. The South didn’t furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground. There they put him away and the clods rattled down on his coffin, and they buried him in a New York coat and a Boston pair of shoes and a pair of breeches from Chicago and a shirt from Cincinnati, leaving him nothing to carry into the next world with him to remind him of the country in which he lived, and for which he fought for four years, but the chill of blood in his veins and the marrow in his bones.”
⁵⁹

NEW FORMS OF SLAVERY

Immediately after the Civil War, southern states passed laws and constitutional amendments called “black codes,” designed to re-create the equivalent of slavery. The black codes were abolished by the federal government during Reconstruction, but after federal occupation of the former slave states ended in 1877, the white southern elite used law and violence to reduce the freedmen to the status of a subjugated, disfranchised labor force. New forms of serfdom in the South were devised for black agricultural workers. In 1910, 93 percent of black Americans were living in the South; 60 percent of adult black men worked in farming.
⁶⁰
Sharecropping and the crop-lien system forced poor whites and blacks alike into debt peonage. Another method of debt peonage took the form of the purchase by local oligarchs of the coerced labor of black men and women, by the method of paying their court fines for real crimes and trumped-up offenses alike.

In an exposé published in the North in 1904, an unidentified “Negro peon” told how he was tricked into debt peonage for a cotton planter known only as the Senator: “The next morning it was explained to us by the two guards appointed to watch us that, in the papers, we had signed the day before, we had not only made acknowledgment of our indebtedness, but that we had also agreed to work for the Senator until the debts were paid by hard labor.”
⁶¹
The man ended up spending three years in the Senator’s peon camp.
⁶²

The convict-lease system was another method by which the defiant South re-created slavery in all but name. Southern state governments and county sheriffs made profits by arresting blacks, often for minor offenses, and then leasing their labor to big farmers, capitalists, and corporations.
⁶³
After Alabama established its convict-lease system in 1875, 20 percent died in the first year, 35 percent in the second, and 45 percent in the fourth.
⁶⁴
Southern blacks were prevented from migrating to the North. Southern sheriffs harassed agents of northern companies who tried to recruit black workers, while the white working class in the North carried out violent pogroms against black migrants whom they viewed as competitors for jobs and neighborhoods. The Great Migration of blacks out of the South took place only after World War I, and subsequent immigration laws cut off the supply of European immigrant workers in the North. The federal government’s indifference to de facto slavery in the South changed only when American racism became an embarrassment during America’s crusades against the racist slave empires of Germany and Japan and America’s Cold War competition with the Soveit Union to appeal to nonwhite populations in former European colonies.

THE WEST

In addition to the farms and timber plantations of the South, industrial America’s internal resource colonies also included the mines of the mountain West and the ranches and farms of the prairie and the Great Plains.

The age of the great cattle drives following the Civil War was brief, although it lives on in Hollywood mythology. The heyday of the long-distance cattle drives to the markets of the Midwest and North came after the Civil War, from the 1860s to the 1880s, before railroads and refrigerator cars made them anachronistic.

Enormous amounts of range land had been opened up for grazing after the US Army had forced the remaining Plains Indians onto reservations. The cattle business in the Great Plains was dominated by large cattle companies owned by eastern and foreign investors, such as the London-chartered Spur Land and Cattle Company and the Scotland-based Matador Land and Cattle Company. The XIT Ranch in the Texas Panhandle was the largest fenced range in the world, at one point covering parts of ten counties in Texas. It originated when the Texas legislature conveyed three million acres of state-owned land in return for the construction of a new capitol building in Austin to Charles and John Farwell, two brothers who had made a fortune in the dry-goods business in Chicago. The Farwells created a London-based corporation, the Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company, which sold bonds to British and American investors.

After harsh winters between 1884 and 1887 decimated many herds, a number of the cattle companies sold their land to small farmers. Conflict with ranchers who considered the grassland to be a common resource often broke out when the farmers fenced off sections with barbed wire, invented in 1874 by J. F. Glidden of Illinois. Aided by another new technology, the water-pumping metal windmill, farm families sometimes lived for a time in sod houses before putting up frame houses protected from the prairie winds by windbreaks of clustered trees and shrubs.

Putting up windbreaks was one method of obtaining land, under federal law. The original Homestead Act was followed by the Timber Culture Act of 1873, which granted 160 acres to settlers who planted 40 acres of trees. Because this proved to be unrealistic in the prairie and plains environments, in 1878, the law was amended to provide 10 acres in return for the construction of shelterbelts or windbreaks. The Desert Land Act of 1877 provided 640 acres to settlers who irrigated desert land; this challenge had few takers. Under the 1878 Timber and Stone Act, settlers were permitted to buy federal land unsuitable for farming at a discount if they cut timber or quarried stone on it.
⁶⁵

In 1890, the Census Bureau reported the closing of the western frontier. The symbolic closing of the frontier took place a few years later, on September 16, 1893, in Oklahoma. At the signal of a cannon’s boom, a hundred thousand Americans, during one of the nation’s worst depressions, raced each other on foot, horseback, or bicycles to claim parcels of land in the Cherokee Strip. Many of the “boomers” who had patiently waited for the boom of the cannon discovered that they had been preceded by “sooners” who gave Oklahoma its nickname, the Sooner State.

In the same year, 1893, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered an influential paper to the American Historical Association entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner argued that the frontier had shaped American democracy and speculated about how American society would be affected by its disappearance in the essay and, no doubt, in the classes he taught at Columbia University, where one of his students was a young man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

DEFEAT OF THE WHEAT

The very success of railroads in creating national and international markets created economic problems for farmers on both sides of the Atlantic. As American grain and meat transported overland by rail and overseas by steamships poured into the markets of Britain and continental Europe, prices fell in both Central and Eastern Europe and the American Midwest. According to one British observer, the “revolution in the food supply of European countries” was caused by “the American railroad.”
⁶⁶
In Europe the prolonged distress of the agricultural sector led to mass immigration to the United States and other lands of European settlement. Peasant parties anticipated the fascist movements of the twentieth century by blaming economic problems on conspiracies by Jews and foreigners.