History
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16-1Age of Steel
The Bessemer process, as portrayed in this British painting, enabled molten pig iron to be turned into steel by blowing extremely hot air through it. The Bessemer Steel Converter made steel cheaper and stronger, leading to robust production that drove the global economic expansion of the late nineteenth century.
SSPL/Getty Images
What does this image reveal about the labor conditions for factory workers? What were the dangers?
The end of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in technology and business innovation that transformed the way people worked and lived. Steel enabled the construction of high-rise buildings that became the hallmark of dense cities, which drew people into closer proximity with one another. Steamships became larger and faster as global trade expanded and immigrants poured into the United States, greatly increasing the pace of urbanization. Industrialists, such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan, capitalized on scientific breakthroughs to boost the consumption of their products and profits using new legal and business practices to consolidate their corporations and expand market share. This business expansion, however, was tempered by economic instability and a major economic downturn in 1893 that hurt not only the rich and powerful but also workers, immigrants, and farmers as the nation struggled to adjust to economic cycles of boom and bust.
As you read, think about the specific ways in which technological innovation and business consolidation transformed the global economy. How did the economic cycles of boom and bust affect business owners, workers, and farmers?
16-1aInternational Advances in Technology and Manufacturing
Electricity and steel production drive new types of industrial development.
The marriage of theoretical science and its practical application in the late nineteenth century prompted what observers later described as the Second Industrial Revolution . Building on the major technological advances in British manufacturing made earlier in the nineteenth century, businesses capitalized on new technologies in industrial chemistry and the production of steel and electricity. These innovations combined with advances in railroad transportation after the Civil War created a synergy in which global markets in steel, grains, petroleum, and fertilizers flourished. This growth was most rapid in the United States, Great Britain, northwestern Europe, and Japan, but the effects were felt throughout the global economy (see Figure 16.1).
Figure 16.1Highest Steel- and Wheat-Producing Countries, 1860–1900 (in metric tons)
Production of steel and wheat is a good indicator of a country’s economic development and participation in the global market. Initially, steel production in the United States lagged behind that of both Great Britain and Germany but by 1900 almost matched the two combined. The United States was a leader in wheat production and exports throughout this period; by 1890, Japan and India, in addition to the countries shown here, had also begun producing wheat for their own consumption.
Sources: Mitchell, B.R. International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–2005. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; International Historical Statistics: The Americas, 1750–2005. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; International Historical Statistics: Africa, Asia, and Oceania, 1750–2005. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
U.S. businessmen applied scientific research emerging in European cersities to industrial markets. By the early twentieth century, more than one hundred fifty U.S. companies, such as U.S. Steel, DuPont, and Standard Oil operated research facilities that hired foreign scientists. These companies found practical uses for theoretical innovations in chemistry, engineering, and physics for consumer use. The companies also engaged in what is now called patent trolling, the practice of buying any new patents to lessen competition. The three most transformative technologies during this period were electricity, Bessemer steel, and the automobile.
Of these innovations, electricity had the most dramatic initial impact in people’s day-to-day lives by stimulating new types of inventions. In 1876, Thomas Alva Edison created the first U.S. commercial research lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Among the dozens of inventions that Edison produced over his lifetime, the first practical incandescent bulb transformed daily life. Although a number of inventors across Europe and the United States developed the bulb itself, Edison made it marketable by creating the first commercially successful electrical system in New York City in 1882. Streets, factories, and many homes were lit using electricity instead of gas. Edison declared, “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”
By 1887, the United States had 121 generating plants that distributed electricity through Edison’s direct current (DC). Meanwhile, George Westinghouse, another U.S. inventor, developed alternating current (AC), which was more practical because it allowed electricity to travel long distances at high voltage via transformers and then be transformed to low voltage for civic, commercial, and home use. After intense competition, AC current eventually became the voltage used in the United States. Able to run electrical machines around the clock, businesses then instituted both day and night shifts and extended the workday.
Communication also transformed rapidly at the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1840s, engineers in Russia, Germany, and the United States had developed the electric telegraph that increased the speed of communication. In 1851, the United States and Europe had adopted Samuel Morse’s patented telegraph and coded alphabet. By the middle part of the century, telegraph wires and poles had covered much of North America. The first transatlantic telegraph cable between Ireland and Newfoundland was laid in 1858, but broke after a month, and its investors lost confidence. A second cable weighing one ton per nautical mile laid in 1866 proved more durable. By the end of the nineteenth century, British, French, German, and U.S. telegraph companies had laid multiple cables that could carry more than one message at a time, thus making the connection between Europe and the United States closer. In 1876, the Scottish emigrant Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, which allowed sounds to be transmitted over wires.
Exposition Universelle or World’s Fair, Paris, 1900
Panorama of the gardens of Trocadero and Champ-de- Mars. World’s Fairs like this one and the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 were created to bring countries together to share ideas, inventions and to show off for others. The 1900 Fair was meant to celebrate the turn of the twentieth century and praised the trends in modernism and Art Noveau.
ND/Roger Viollet/Getty Images
The Bessemer steel process , first introduced into the United States from England, was a second technology during this period that transformed industry across the globe. Prior to the Bessemer process, steel was uneven in quality and too expensive to be used for anything other than small tools. Steel replaced pig iron, which was brittle and thus limited in its uses. After a conversation with Napoleon III, Emperor of France, about the poor quality of pig iron for manufacturing armaments, Sir Henry Bessemer improved his oxidation experiments that rid pig iron of its impurities. Convinced that the process had commercial potential, Bessemer patented it in 1856. The resulting steel was much stronger, 80 percent cheaper, took less time to manufacture, and was less labor intensive than manufacturing pig iron.
In 1873, Andrew Carnegie introduced the Bessemer process at his Homestead plant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The new steel transformed almost every industry. Buildings could be built taller and bridges made longer. Skyscrapers and suspension bridges began to dot the urban landscape, especially in New York, Chicago, London, and Paris. The transcontinental railroad system would not have been possible without Bessemer steel.
The automobile was the third technological innovation that had a profound impact on the global economy. Karl Benz of Germany, the inventor of the automobile, developed the commercially viable internal combustion engine. By 1896, his was the largest car manufacturing company in the world, selling a modest 596 units that year. But it was Henry Ford in the United States who mastered mass assembly, drawing on techniques such as using interchangeable parts, developed during the First Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century in England and Massachusetts. Ford pioneered a new system of production by using machines and moving assembly lines to dramatically increase the speed of production. By 1914, Ford had cut the time to make an automobile from more than twelve hours to ninety-three minutes. The efficiency saved money as well as time, allowing Ford to slash the price of his popular Model T car from $950 in 1909 to $290 in 1924. Rapid technological and commercial innovation during the late nineteenth century reinforced a feeling of modernity among many Americans.
Singer Sewing Machine Ad, Revista Popular, 1880
Advertisement for Singer sewing machines to be bought on credit system. The ad appeared in the1880 edition of the Spanish publication Revista Popular de Conocimientos Utiles. Ads for U.S. companies such as Singer, Coca Cola, and International Harvester reveal the extent of U.S. commercial influence.
Classic Image/Alamy Stock Photo
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16-1bNew Business Practices
Organizational innovations make corporations more efficient and successful.
In addition to applying technological innovations, businesses also transformed operations and marketing. Industrial capitalism fully replaced eighteenth-century economic views about merchant capitalism, as surplus labor , and goods entered the global market. One of the most useful concepts that industrialists applied to their enterprises was vertical integration , which allowed a company to control each part of the supply chain , from natural resources through production and delivery, to marketing and sales.
Andrew Carnegie was one of the first U.S. businessmen to perfect this system. He acquired iron and coal mines, as well as the coke ovens that produced the high-quality fuel needed to produce steel. He either owned or made close alliances with railroad lines that would ship and deliver his products. By controlling the entire supply chain, Carnegie maximized efficiencies and cost savings. Both reformers and workers, however, protested the immense power concentrated in vertically integrated corporations.
American businesses also used monopolies, which had been used by colonial governments and were the basis of the transatlantic economy. A true monopoly exists when one firm or a group of firms exerts total control over the supply of a good or service in order to control its price. Even though it did not reach that benchmark, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil owned 88 percent of all oil-refining facilities in the country, practically shutting out all other competition. Rockefeller then used vertical integration to control other parts of the oil supply chain. Until the Supreme Court ruled in 1911 that his company was an unfair monopoly, Standard Oil was the largest corporation in the nation.
Rockefeller’s near-monopoly created a holding company that allowed Standard Oil to control many other corporations. This legal device allowed the board (or trustees) of one firm to govern dozens of others, ensuring that they did not compete with one another. During the great merger movement between 1895 and 1905, manufacturers of everything from paper bags to tin merged small businesses into gigantic holding companies. More than eighteen hundred firms disappeared and were replaced by consolidated firms prefaced with brand names connoting nationwide power, such as American, Standard, Union, or General. Many consolidated firms, such as Otis Elevator and International Harvester, controlled 70 percent or more of their respective industries. The reasons for the mergers remain controversial among historians. One reason could have been that the industries were trying to suppress competitive price wars by buying out competitors. Another reason could have been that the industries were simply trying to become more efficient through scale economies in transportation or capital investment.
These business practices and improved efficiency not only provided U.S. consumers a new array of choices but also expanded U.S. exports (see Figure 16.2). The Singer Sewing Machine Corporation, for example, had been selling its machines since the early nineteenth century. Innovations in marketing and production enabled Singer to begin exporting on a scale that would have been unimaginable earlier. By the early twentieth century, U.S. industrialized consumer products from typewriters and cameras to razor blades and packaged cereals had become popular items in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
Figure 16.2U.S. Exports and Imports, 1860–1900
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the United States became increasingly enmeshed in the global economy by importing and exporting goods. The United States had a fairly even trade balance in 1870, but by 1880, its exports had surpassed imports. By the turn of the twentieth century, the value of exports was nearly double that of imports, indicating U.S. companies’ ability to export wheat, steel, and finished manufactured goods, such as combines and sewing machines.
Source: Mitchell, B.R. International Historical Statistics: The Americas, 1750–2005. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
The global economy expanded dramatically in the late nineteenth century with every industrialized country seeing significant growth in productivity, exports, and imports. But even among this phenomenal growth, the United States stood out. The U.S. economy quintupled in size and accounted for 25 percent of global economic growth in the period between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century. The U.S. economy was the largest in the world and was more than twice the size of the next largest economic powerhouses, Germany and the United Kingdom. These two economies had grown because of their access to new markets with the opening of the Suez Canal. U.S. growth depended on the extraction of the West’s resources and the immigrant labor that was flooding into the country and providing the human power to develop those resources and markets.
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16-1cRisk and Economic Volatility
Cycles of prosperity and depression destabilize the global economy.
After 1865, the global economy grew as the United States built railroads and established new markets and European powers developed their colonial possessions. But two periods of economic depression were interspersed in this generally upward trend. These boom-bust cycles triggered dramatic upswings and downward spirals and contributed to income inequality. In 1873, both sides of the Atlantic experienced an economic depression brought on by the collapse of railroad expansion and the demonetization of silver (see Chapter 14). Banks in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain shuttered, and companies shut down production, laid off workers, and declared bankruptcy. The New York Stock Exchange closed for twenty days, and more than one hundred U.S. railroad lines failed or were in bankruptcy by 1874. In the United States, the depression lasted until 1877. Great Britain fared even worse and endured twenty years of economic downturn called the long stagnation.
In 1893, after almost a decade of economic growth in the United States, an economic depression again engulfed global markets. The downturn began in France in 1889, and Great Britain and Germany felt the recession by the following year. The collapse of speculative projects in European colonial outposts in South Africa, Australia, and Latin America caused both European and U.S. banks that had financed the speculation to falter. Like the 1873 depression, as the market became saturated, rampant railroad speculation and then railway failures also triggered the Panic of 1893 . Many of these railroads had been financed by British banks, which were overly leveraged with bad debt. At the peak of the depression, fifteen thousand companies and five hundred banks in the United States had failed, and almost 20 percent of Americans were unemployed. Workers in the cities fared much worse. Unemployment reached nearly 35 percent in New York City. Europe did not fully recover from the recession until 1896. The worldwide depression showed just how interdependent the European and U.S. economies were. Both were also intertwined with the global speculative and growing markets. A downturn in one part of the world could trigger panic and decline in other markets.
Such economic volatility made life precarious for businessmen, workers, and their families. Small farms and businesses were particularly vulnerable to downturns. Those with more money and economic stability were able to better weather the crises. Mark Twain labeled this period the Gilded Age because a thin veneer of opulent wealth for the few gilded the problems, corruption, and inequalities associated with industrialization, urbanization, and immigration that accompanied such rapid growth.
16-2Growth of Cities
This photograph, taken between 1900 and 1910, shows laundry hanging above the yard between tenement buildings in Manhattan. Many city dwellers left the crowded living conditions on the southern end of New York City. They spread north as a result of both the growing immigrant population and the desire of wealthy families to live uptown on Park Avenue and Central Park West, away from the masses.
Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection
What does the photograph suggest about the ways that families adapted to such crowded living situations?
The technological innovations that drove the spectacular growth of the world economy also drove people to reconsider how and where they wanted to live. One of the most dramatic shifts at the end of the nineteenth century was the global migration of peoples to other countries and cities to take advantage of new economic and social opportunities. During this period, millions of people left their rural homes and made their way across international borders, oceans, and sometimes just across the state to find a new life in the emerging cities. The period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I saw the largest migration of peoples to date within the borders of the United States as well as from other nations.
As you read, consider how the influx of these new migrants transformed cities. What types of infrastructure did cities have to create to accommodate them? How did living in urban areas reshape people’s social lives?
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16-2aLocal and Global Migrations
Immigrants from around the world and migrants from the countryside transform U.S. cities.
The efficiencies created by technological advances—including the development of the combine, which required less demand for manual labor, and the railroads—allowed Americans to leave their farms in unprecedented numbers. Drawn to urban areas by jobs in manufacturing, sales, and distribution, people flocked to U.S. cities seeking jobs, homes, and the consumer goods associated with living there. Although families often moved, young rural single men and women made up the majority of the internal migrants. The urban population of the United States increased by seven times in the last half of nineteenth century.
Western cities also grew rapidly, although they did not match the size or pace of eastern urban areas. Port cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle became commercial centers that processed, marketed, and sold the natural resources of the U.S. West internally and to rest of the world. Interior hub cities such as Denver, Fort Worth, and Kansas City processed wheat and livestock and were connected by an expanding railroad system that tied rural America to the rest of the nation.
Although the South remained largely rural throughout this period with only 17 percent of its population living in cities, the region also felt the impact of internal migration (see Map 16.1). In addition to the freedmen who moved to both southern and northern cities, rural whites also took advantage of the new urban opportunities. Black and white women found new work as domestic servants as well as in factories. Migration to southern cities was part of an economic expansion pushed by southern elites in the wake of Reconstruction’s end. Leaders such as Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, hailed the New South as the place where increased industrialization and an influx of capital would lift the region out of its economic devastation. This vision of economic uplift for the South, however, was not based on racial equality because the Southern elite continued to believe in white supremacy and saw Jim Crow laws as a part of this new regime.
Map 16.1Global Immigration Patterns, 1900
Immigrants from both Asia and Europe pressed into the Americas to make homes and find work in these booming economies. Notice that in this period, as opposed to the early nineteenth century, more immigrants came from southern, rather than northern, Europe. Consider what both pushed and pulled these immigrants to relocate. Notice that other places in the Americas also received large immigrant populations. Was the U.S. immigrant experience unique?
The movement of rural peoples into U.S. cities only partly explains the unprecedented pace of urbanization. The key factor that made cities grow rapidly and more diverse was the wave of immigrants who arrived between 1870 and 1920. Earlier immigrants were largely German, British, Irish, and Scandinavian sojourners who tended to arrive with skills and some capital to start a business. More than half of those from Germany traveled west to start farms using the Homestead Act, but the remainder stayed in the cities where they built tightly knit communities.
By the 1880s, the immigrant flow shifted to arrivals of the new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, who were young—between the ages of fifteen and forty-five—and were mostly Catholic or Jewish. Seventy percent were young men looking for economic opportunity. Unlike earlier waves, these men were unskilled laborers who worked some of the dirtiest and most difficult jobs in the industrial economy. They left their countries of origin for a variety of reasons, including economic upheaval from the global depressions of the 1870s and 1890s and religious persecution from pogroms . The most prevalent factor, however, was the lure of employment in the expanding U.S. economy. Migrants who had been “pushed” from their homeland by famine or persecution came to start a new life. Those “pulled” by job possibilities often planned a temporary stay, but most settled permanently. The two major immigration stations, Ellis Island (1890–1964) in New York harbor and Angel Island (1910–1940) in San Francisco Bay together processed more than 13 million immigrants (see Map 16.2).
Map 16.2U.S. Immigration and Urbanization, 1890–1900
Millions of immigrants spread across the United States to find economic opportunity in both rural and urban locations. The orange-shaded areas in the U.S. West show where immigrants flocked to work in the mining and agricultural industries. In the Northeast, immigrants were more concentrated in cities, with Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia totaling a million people, making them some of the largest and most vibrant cities globally.
Although most immigrants to the United States in this era were Europeans, western cities took in thousands who came from Asia and Mexico. Immigrants from China and Japan and to a lesser extent Korea, India, and the Philippines came to West Coast ports on transpacific steamer ships that carried goods and people. Prior to 1924, Mexican immigrants easily crossed back and forth across the U.S.–Mexico border, which was unpatrolled in most places. These people lived and worked in the growing industries of mining, ranching, and agriculture in the West.
The massive global migrations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries affected the United States in two unique ways. First, it received more immigrants than any other country. From the 1830s to 1930, the United States took in 60 percent of all immigrants from Europe. Canada, in second place, received 12 percent. The ability to absorb so many foreigners reflected the availability of land and the rapid industrial growth in the United States. Second, the nation received a much broader diversity of newcomers than other countries. Canada’s immigrants came mainly from Great Britain, and those to South America were overwhelmingly Iberian and Italian. Immigrants to the United States, however, came from all over the world. Arriving in U.S. cities, these diverse newcomers created ethnic neighborhoods (Little Italy, Little Tokyo, Greektown, Chinatown, etc.) that were often sealed off from each other and from mainstream society by heritage, language, culture, food, and social customs. Yet the new immigrants found themselves working side-by-side with people from other immigrant communities and together created civic organizations, unions, and religious communities that cut across ethnic lines. Such experiences and institutions advanced the process of assimilation through which immigrants developed common forms of communication and understanding while still maintaining distinct ethnic identities and practices. To the optimist, the merging of global, ethnic, and linguistic differences exemplified the United States as a melting pot , a timely metaphor drawn from a blast furnace, which forged different elements into solid metal.
16-2bUrban Infrastructures
Electricity and other technological innovations transform the urban landscape.
Thousands of people moving into such concentrated masses in the cities required local governments to build infrastructures that kept cities running efficiently and cleanly by addressing the most urgent problems: transportation and public health.
Prior to the Second Industrial Revolution, people in cities relied on their bodies (by walking) and horses (by riding in omnibuses or wagons) to move themselves and their goods. The crowding and the piles of animal waste on the streets convinced officials that horse-drawn transportation was not workable in this dense environment. After an outbreak of equine influenza that killed thousands of horses, it became clear that cities needed to find a new energy source for transportation.
In the early 1880s, a number of city governments such as those in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Richmond, Virginia, and Newark, New Jersey, experimented with public transportation powered by electricity. By the late 1880s, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York riders were using electric or cable trolley cars that moved along embedded rail lines laid in the middle of roads. There was also a surge in building elevated rail lines and, in 1897, Boston built the nation’s first urban transportation system consisting of both subways and above-ground trains. By the beginning of the twentieth century, thousands of miles of subways, elevated trains, cable cars, and improved roads had been constructed in the nation’s cities. These improvements enabled shorter travel times, allowing people to live farther from their workplaces.
The cheaper and stronger steel made possible by the Bessemer process produced a surge in civil engineering projects, building rail lines, bridges, and skyscrapers that transformed the nation’s cities. The 1883 opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, which connected Manhattan and Brooklyn, then the fourth largest city in the United States, was celebrated as one of the great engineering feats of the century and expanded commerce between two thriving downtown areas. In the mid-1880s, architects and engineers developed the Chicago frame , which took advantage of steel rather than stone or brick to build lighter and taller structures. The earlier 1852 invention of the elevator had made skyscrapers practical. The new buildings, in turn, allowed for increased urban density as cities rose skyward, packing more people into fewer square feet of land. The price of this land shot up because a new building such as a high-rise apartment complex could house many more rent-paying tenants. Fortunes were made in urban real estate that rivaled those made in western land speculation.
Map of Chicago’s Elevated Trains, 1897
This illustrated map shows the elevated train lines of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad in Chicago, Illinois. Also note the infrastructure of the city in term of the roads laid out in a grid, and the Chicago River, which had been reengineered to flow backwards so that the industrial waste of the city and the stockyards would flow away from the city center and into Lake Michigan.
The Granger Collection, New York
City officials created intricate water and sewer systems to deal with public health issues in addition to building public transportation systems, bridges, and skyscrapers. Overcrowding made it dangerous for families to dump their night soil onto the streets or to dig outhouses in the back of apartment buildings. The United States had suffered a series of cholera, typhoid, and yellow fever epidemics because of poor sanitation systems. Mother Jones’s family had been victims of such an epidemic in Memphis. The first sewer systems were built in London as the result of a devastating cholera outbreak in 1858. The first sewage treatment plant in the United States was built in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1890. In one of the greatest hydraulic engineering feats of the time, the city of Chicago in 1887 changed the course of the Chicago River so that it could more effectively deal with its sewage problem from both humans and the Union Stockyards on Chicago’s south side.
Public officials also lived in constant fear of a great catastrophe. The 1871 Great Chicago Fire killed three hundred people and burned almost the entire city’s downtown. The fire that swept through Boston a year later burned sixty-five acres, caused $73.5 million in damages, and killed thirty people. These two fires prompted municipalities across the nation to make sure that there was ample public water available to fight fires and inspired the creation of city-funded professional firefighter services. But even this planning could not prevent the impact of natural disasters such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In the quake and fires that ensued, more than three thousand people died and 80 percent of the city burned to the ground.
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16-2cCities and Their Countrysides
Transportation technologies bring rural and urban spaces together.
Urbanization transformed the cities as well as the surrounding countryside, drawing rural places into the economic orbit of cities. Agriculture and transportation systems developed rapidly to meet the demands of the cities, which did not have the physical ability to feed their growing populations. Moreover, as urban populations exploded, more affluent residents moved out of city centers. To escape the crowds in lower Manhattan, New York’s wealthiest families moved farther north up Fifth Avenue, and after Central Park was finished in 1858 and transportation lines expanded, they moved to the Upper West Side. In the late nineteenth century, the rise of the popular streetcar and railroad allowed people to commute to the suburbs , such as the North Shore of Chicago, Brookline just outside of Boston, and Westchester north of New York.
Although boosters of suburban communities espoused the idea that the countryside was separate from the teeming masses and dirty streets that epitomized the U.S. city, in reality, the two were intimately connected. These early suburbs were “bedroom” communities that housed middle-class workers who still depended on the city for their economic survival. Men traveled to work each day on the newly expanded commuter train lines. People depended on the city to provide their consumer demands. Department stores such as Bullocks in Los Angeles, Marshall Fields in Chicago, and Macy’s in New York provided fancy clothes and household goods that could be purchased in the city centers and moved to new homes in the suburbs.
More subtly, and perhaps in ways that most city dwellers did not realize, the success of the cities depended on the countryside for their survival. They also depended on public funds, rather than private corporations, to build urban infrastructure projects. Cities utilized not only technological advances and public funding to create waterworks and sewers but also nearby natural resources to supply their fresh drinking water. New York built the forty-one-mile Croton Aqueduct to bring ample fresh water to holding lakes in Central Park and under today’s New York Public Library. It was then distributed to a series of fresh-water fountains throughout the city for public use. (Piped indoor plumbing would not come to most city dwellers until the early twentieth century.) San Francisco completed one of the most ambitious public water works projects when it brought water 167 miles in a gravity-driven system from a newly built dam in Yosemite National Park. The controversy over damming the Hetch Hetchy River in California pitted President Theodore Roosevelt against John Muir, one of the earliest environmentalists and the founder of the Sierra Club in 1892, sparking the beginning of the modern environmental movement.
Burgeoning cities depended on the countryside for food as well as water. City dwellers provided almost no food for themselves because of the crowded conditions and lack of gardens. The rural areas closest to the cities provided eggs, milk, and fresh produce that could be trucked in daily. With the advent of better transportation and wide use of refrigerated train cars in the 1880s by companies such as Armour and Company, U.S. city dwellers could have clean, dressed beef shipped to their local stores. Grain grown in the countrysides was also delivered to cities. By the end of the nineteenth century, most city dwellers could expect to find most of the foods they needed at their local grocery or on the carts that lined city streets. That availability of these products depended on the intricate balance between technology, transportation, the market, and the countryside.
16-3Life in Industrialized America
This 1890 photo of an Italian immigrant family was taken by photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis. This family was living in a one-room apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. Riis exposed the way poor and immigrant familes lived and worked during the late nineteenth century.
Museum of the City of New York/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
What does Riis’s photograph reveal about this family and how its members could benefit from attempts at social reform? Why would this family pose for him?
Disparities in class and racial divisions in the United States became more apparent as the century came to a close. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people increased after the Civil War and by the end of the century, a small percentage of individuals controlled a majority of the nation’s wealth, creating class divisions. Many Americans, however, interpreted this accumulation of wealth as something positive for the nation, a source for inspiration and aspiration. In this way, the working classes admired the rags-to-riches stories of commanding business leaders such as Andrew Carnegie because they held out hope that they too could become rich and powerful. At the same time, these stories, supported by interpretations of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, taught Americans that their own limitations and failures—not the structure of the economy—prevented them from climbing out of poverty. Such theories, together with violent state repression, stymied reform efforts seeking to improve the conditions for millions of poor Americans and their families.
As you read, think about the kinds of economic and racial tensions that emerged within a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society filled with a range of new immigrants and internal migrants.
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16-3aInequality
Economic inequalities lead to class divisions and explanations for those divisive disparities.
Accelerating technological innovation created vast amounts of cash and capital as the global economy grew. Consumers purchased new goods and services, which created more jobs and wealth. This increased wealth, however, was not evenly distributed. Capitalists, who were derisively called Robber Barons because of the opulent way they displayed their wealth and their apparent disregard for the working classes, accumulated wealth at a far higher rate than workers. James Bryce, an Englishman talking about the U.S. elite, noted in 1897 that “those who deem themselves ladies and gentlemen draw just the same line between themselves and the multitude as is drawn in [aristocratic] England, and draw it in much the same way.” Americans, who liked to distinguish between their democratic republic and old world feudalism, found Bryce’s comparisons offensive. Yet wealthy New Yorkers proved his point at the annual 1898 Christmas dinner they sponsored for the poor in Madison Square Garden. The elite came and sat in the galleries and watched twenty thousand of the city’s poor line up to eat at the tables below them.
Global Americans
Andrew Carnegie (Far Right) with Booker T. Washington and Others at the Tuskegee Institute’s 25th Anniversary
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington[LC-USZ62-102808]
Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland where his father was a skilled weaver but struggled to provide for his family. In 1848, the Carnegies emigrated to Allegheny, Pennsylvania. At thirteen, he found work as a bobbin boy for $1.20 a week. Two years later, he found a job as a messenger boy for a telegraph company. Self-educated, Carnegie found another job as a secretary when he was eighteen at Pennsylvania Railway Company and began his upward climb into corporate America. During the Civil War, he worked to open rail and telegraph lines for the North, earning an excellent wage and making lucrative investments. By the end of the war, Carnegie recognized that real wealth and growth lay in the development of the steel industry to supply the expanding railways. He opened his own steel works, and eventually purchased the rival Homestead Steel Works in 1888. The introduction of Bessemer steel into the U.S. economy caused dramatic growth and development of the nation’s infrastructure. By 1901, when Carnegie sold his interest to J.P. Morgan, U.S. Steel became the first $1 billion company. Carnegie faced criticism for his labor policies that included brutal strike breaking. In his later career, however, based on his teachings from “The Gospel of Wealth,” he funded thousands of libraries both in the United States and abroad and endowed cultural institutions and recreational facilities for working families. During the Spanish-American War, which he opposed, he joined the Anti-Imperialist League and became an outspoken critic of U.S. imperial ambitions in both the Caribbean and the Pacific.
American popular culture revered self-made men like Cornelius Vanderbilt. They were the heroes of popular novels by the prolific author Horatio Alger, who wrote almost one hundred books during his career. The formulaic narratives told the rags-to-riches stories of young, poor boys who worked hard and were thrifty and honest—virtues that led to their inevitable climb into the comfortable middle class. Wealth and success were tied to moral uprightness whereas poverty was ascribed to laziness and moral failings. Such views of rich and poor were backed by new but pseudoscientific theories, such as Social Darwinism , were popular, which argued that Darwin’s theory of evolution as outlined in his famous Origin of Species (1859) could be applied to human societies. While Darwin limited his concept of natural selection to biological contexts, highly regarded English social thinkers, including Herbert Spencer and Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton, ranked various groups in society based on evolutionary notions of the “survival of the fittest.” In the United States, Social Darwinists such as William Sumner of Yale University applied the theory of evolution to the emerging U.S. industrialized society. In 1883, Sumner argued in his pamphlet “What the Social Classes Owe Each Other” against social reforms to help the poor because society worked best when it was left alone (laissez-faire) to let the strongest survive. He warned that the government must stay out of social and economic affairs and focus instead on individual rights and protections.
Unlike Social Darwinists, the powerful business leader Andrew Carnegie believed that the rich were duty bound to return capital to the working class. One of the wealthiest men in America, Carnegie embodied the Horatio Alger hero who was transformed from rags to riches. In decrying the new class of wealthy industrialists who lived opulently with no regard to the workers they employed, he developed a philosophy called the gospel of wealth that extolled his paternalistic vision of the obligations of the wealthy classes to the laboring poor. He favored Britain’s high estate tax that penalized what he called “selfish and greedy” men who died wealthy and left their riches to their families. Carnegie believed that men of wealth needed to engage in paternalistic philanthropy, give away the majority of their money, and thus help guide the poor to live rewarding lives. He lived by his creed by donating $10 million to found the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (which still exists today), the largest gift at the time to support harmonious global relations.
Carnegie had a very clear vision of those he believed to be worthy of his largesse. To advance educational opportunities, he built more than twenty-five hundred libraries across the world (sixteen hundred of them in the United States), endowed schools that eventually became the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie-Mellon University), erected concert halls, and gave money to institutions that he believed would help working peoples improve their lives. He did not believe in charity or welfare but maintained that the poor were lazy and needed to be taught skills to improve their lives. The philanthropist’s largesse also did not extend to the thousands of workers at his own companies whose requests for collective bargaining he denied repeatedly. As a result, the workers educated themselves about the power of organized labor, which much to Carnegie’s chagrin, led to many contentious strikes.
One great irony of the late nineteenth century is that while industrialists fought off the ever-looming threat of unionization, the gospel of wealth created a space for workers to develop their own class identity. Whether it was while sitting in a library endowed by Carnegie or working under the ever-present watchful eye of the foreman, employees came to see themselves as a distinctive economic class from their employers.
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16-3bEthnic Segregation and Racial Divisions
Although the Civil War ends slavery, conflicts over race and ethnicity continue.
Racial segregation became the pattern in most U.S. cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, ethnic groups, such as the Bohemians, Poles, and Slavs, congregated into neighborhoods close to their industrial jobs at the Chicago stockyards where they worked on the killing floors of the Swift and Armour meatpacking plants. They joined earlier Irish and German immigrants, making up the multiethnic, neighborhood-centric cities that came to symbolize U.S. urbanism. Mexicans and African Americans remained segregated in less desirable locations farther from work. In many cases, their urban neighborhoods became institutionalized as barrios and segregated neighborhoods for racial minorities. In addition to experiencing urban segregation in southern cities after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, African Americans faced restrictions on their voting rights. Ten of the eleven former confederate states passed new state constitutions that disenfranchised blacks. The laws inhibited blacks’ ability to resist the imposition of discriminatory (albeit legal) Jim Crow laws and practices, which in many cases were reapplications of antebellum slave codes (see Table 16.1). Much of the anxiety that provoked Jim Crow was the fear of African American mobility and the loss of their labor. African American families began leaving their rural homes and moved to emerging southern cities such as Memphis, Atlanta, and Birmingham or north to the booming industrial centers of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. These migrations set the pattern for the largest black outflow from the South that started during World War I.
Table 16.1
Select Jim Crow Laws
The term Jim Crow first was used in the early 1890s to describe laws that segregated blacks from whites in restaurants, schools, and public transportation. It regulated all aspects of African Americans’ lives. This table gives a sense of how encompassing these restrictions were for black Americans.
|
State |
Area Restricted |
Restriction |
|
Alabama |
Health care |
White nurses allowed to deny care to black patients |
|
Arizona, Maryland, Wyoming |
Marriage |
Marriage between a Caucasian and a Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu declared null and void |
|
Georgia |
Death |
Whites and blacks separated by law in cemeteries |
|
New Mexico |
Education |
Black and white children segregated in schools |
|
North Carolina |
Education |
Black and white children not allowed to share the same textbooks |
|
Oklahoma |
Public utilities |
Separate telephone booths for blacks and whites maintained by telephone companies |
|
Texas |
Public institutions |
Public libraries segregated |
Even before Reconstruction officially ended, white Southerners returned to power and enacted laws prohibiting the equal treatment of blacks and whites, creating legal ( de jure ) racial classifications. All across the South “Whites Only” signs appeared as private businesses enforced new laws requiring racial segregation by refusing to serve African Americans. Public facilities and transportation, schools, theaters, restaurants, and bathrooms were separated into different spaces for blacks and whites. While this type of racial segregation occurred less frequently outside the South, local governments in the North and West practiced de facto racial segregation and discrimination rooted in common practices rather than overtly racist laws.
African Americans in the South contested the imposition of the new Jim Crow regime. After Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act in 1890, which stipulated that all public transportation would be segregated by race, a group of concerned citizens challenged the law. This group included New Orleans editor and civil rights activist Rodolphe Desdunes (see Chapter 14) who enlisted Homer Plessy, an octoroon (seven-eighths white but categorized as “colored” under the law), to purchase a first-class ticket and board the Whites Only car on a New Orleans tram. Plessy had the blessing of the tram company, which opposed the law because of the high cost of separating blacks and whites. Local police immediately arrested him when he refused to leave the white section of the tram. The incident spurred a series of court rulings that led to an 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Global Americans
The Granger Collection, New York
In 1854, Yung Wing was the first Chinese man to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree at Yale University. He had come to the United States in 1847, accompanying the missionary Reverend S.R. Brown who was returning to the United States from his mission in southern China, where Yung and his family lived on a small farm. Yung became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1852. After graduating, he returned to China where he found work in the government. After the signing of the Burlingame Treaty (see Chapter 14) that permitted Chinese immigration to the United States, Yung developed an educational program in China that enabled Chinese students to study in the United States for four years. He also founded the Chinese Education Mission, which eventually sent more than one hundred students to the United States who returned to China as engineers, teachers, and doctors. While running the program, he married Mary Kellogg and had two sons with her. In 1876, Yale granted him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.
When Empress Dowager Cixi came to power 1898, she decided to end connections with the West. She was suspicious of Yung, who fled to Hong Kong. In 1902, he petitioned the United States to return to Connecticut, but the Department of State had revoked his citizenship as a result of the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 so that he could not legally reenter the United States. With the help of friends and his family, however, Yung returned illegally, just in time to see his youngest son graduate from Yale. He lived the rest of his life in Hartford, Connecticut. A portrait of him hangs at Yale, and PS 124 in Chinatown, New York City, is named after him.
At issue in Plessy v. Ferguson was the plaintiff ’s claim that Louisiana’s segregation of tram riders by race deprived him of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and imposed involuntary servitude on him, a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment. In a seven-to-one decision, the Supreme Court held that Louisiana law could segregate citizens by race into separate physical spaces so long as those spaces were equal in quality and comfort because such segregation did not “stamp … the colored race with a badge of inferiority.” In his lone dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Southerner familiar with Jim Crow practices, argued that Louisiana’s law “put the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens,” because, regardless of the equal quality of the tramcars, “the real meaning of such legislation” was that “colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens.”
Although discriminatory laws were directed primarily against blacks, Asian immigrants became the first targets of exclusionary immigration laws. Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which for a ten year-period barred laborers of Chinese ancestry from entering the United States. Despite attempts by Radical Republicans to naturalize the Chinese, they continued to be banned by a 1790 statute limiting U.S. citizenship to whites. Capitalists, such as the Central Pacific Railroad’s Big Four, benefited from Chinese labor, which was hard to find in the sparsely populated West, and often paid them less than whites. Although a combination of industrialists and supporters of Pacific trade ensured that the door to Chinese migration remained opened, western laborers and workingmen’s organizations had long pressed Congress to shut it.
The Chinese were discouraged from creating stable families as the immigration of women was all but prohibited by the Page Act (1875). The law barred only prostitutes from entering the United States, but its enforcement came to exclude most Chinese women. Only 2 percent of Chinese immigrants were female in 1855 and by 1890, that number had risen to just 4 percent. Asian exclusion policies were not unique to the United States in this era. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as other societies of British origin on the Pacific Rim, passed similar laws restricting the flow of first Chinese, and then Japanese, workers.
The Plessy and Wong Kim Ark decisions occurred against a backdrop of violence toward African Americans and Chinese. Between 1892 and 1901, whites lynched at least one hundred African Americans each year in racially motivated crimes. In 1892 alone, two hundred thirty blacks were murdered, mostly in the South. Sometimes racist whites acted as a mob and sometimes as individuals in what they believed to be vigilante justice. Each case had its own specific circumstances but tended to follow a pattern. White men would perceive some sort of behavior on the part of African American men as offensive. It might have been that a black man had become successful by opening a shop in town, had talked back to a white person, or perhaps had looked at or spoken with a white woman. These perceived transgressions of racial, economic, and sexual boundaries happened as people lived and worked among one another and often led to horrific race-based violence.
Ida B. Wells witnessed such brutality, and its impact transformed her life. She became an outspoken advocate for racial justice. Born a slave in Mississippi, Wells became responsible for the family after her parents died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1876 and she moved her five siblings to Memphis. Even at a young age, she was known for outspoken views on racial equality as the columnist for a local paper. In 1892, her world was turned upside down when a white mob attacked three of her friends who owned the Peoples Cooperative Grocery Store, which competed against a white-owned store. The mob set the store on fire and in the ensuing melee, three white men were shot but not killed. The police arrested Wells’s three African American friends. While they were in jail, a second white mob attacked it, took them out, and lynched them.
In response, Wells called for African Americans to boycott white-owned establishments and even suggested that they leave Memphis where their property and bodies could not be protected. She then worked tirelessly to expose the evils of lynching, specifically that of her friends. She published the pamphlet “Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases.” This earned her the wrath of local whites who threatened her with violence and caused her to flee to Chicago, where she began working for the Chicago Conservator, a well-established African American-owned newspaper. From this platform, Wells broadened her campaign against lynching. She traveled across the North and even to England where huge crowds heard powerful evidence about the failures of Reconstruction and African American quest for racial equality.
While blacks faced racial persecution in the South, Chinese people suffered mob violence throughout the West. In 1871, more than five hundred whites invaded Los Angeles’s Chinatown and killed eighteen people in retaliation for the murder of a white police officer who had intervened in violence among rival Chinese groups. The hostility was fueled by a deadly combination of white supremacist racial views and economic fears that Chinese immigrants were stealing jobs from white men. Pressured by the depressions of the late nineteenth century, white laborers took out their frustrations on Chinese immigrants.
Although violence was widespread throughout the West, one of the region’s most horrific attacks occurred in1885 at Rock Springs, Wyoming, where twenty-eight Chinese were murdered. The thousand or so Chinese people who lived in Wyoming had come to work on the Union Pacific railroad and stayed to work in the company’s coal mines. They also found jobs as cooks, laundry owners, and various other service workers. The railroad paid Chinese laborers less than others and used them as strikebreakers against Cornish, Irish, and Welsh miners who belonged to the Knights of Labor. Encouraged by local Knights members, whites burned the Chinese camp and attacked fleeing residents. Federal troops had to be called in to quell the violence, and the next year at the urging of the U.S. secretary of state, Congress paid a large indemnity to China as compensation to the victims’ families without accepting responsibility for the crime.
16-3cRecreation and Entertainment in the City
Cities create entertainment opportunities for all classes.
Amid spectacular growth, race riots, segregation, and an epidemic of urban squalor, philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller sponsored recreation centers to uplift the poor and calm labor and racial tensions. Rockefeller sponsored the first U.S. branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in 1885. Founded in London in 1844, it provided wholesome activities and safe shortterm housing for working-class youth of “healthy mind, body, and sprit.” The organization began as an evangelical outlet for Protestantism but over time welcomed youth of all Christian faiths and peoples from every continent. YMCA leaders focused on issues of moral uplift, good citizenship, and the redeeming values of athletic competition and recreation.
The Salvation Army was another organization seeking to uplift workers and immigrants from the drudgery of urban life. Methodists William and Katherine Booth founded the organization in England in 1865. They preached “soup, soap, and salvation” as the antidote for the ills suffered by alcoholics, drug users, prostitutes, and the poor. As an advancing “army of Christians,” the organization came to the United States in 1880 and set up operations in urban immigrant communities.
Another form of moral and social uplift came from Catholic charities tied to neighborhood dioceses. At a time when government did not aid the poor and needy through social welfare programs, religious organizations, such as Catholic charities, joined with the YMCA and Salvation Army, forming the frontline of urban social services. These faith-based institutions provided a place where working people found companionship, recreation, and entertainment amid the alienating culture of the late nineteenth century city.
In addition, most immigrant communities provided mutual aid that benefited members of their own ethnic and national groups. Mexican Americans formed mutualista societies whose dues provided modest unemployment insurance, burial insurance, job references, and even personal counseling to families. Almost every small town or community group living in large urban centers had a group such as the Sociedad Proteccion Mutua de Trabaiadores Unidos (SPMDTU). Chinese immigrants depended on their own benevolent societies (huiguan), and in 1882, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, also known as the Six Companies, was incorporated. It supported immigrants by emphasizing moral living and hard work, opposed anti-Chinese legislation and vigilante violence, and encouraged ties to their home provinces and villages.
Not all leisure
and recreation in cities was organized or institutionalized. Increased transportation combined with new leisure time and cash in working people’s pockets led to the emergence of an entertainment economy. In New York, working people could take the outbound train to Coney Island to enjoy what by the 1880s had become the largest amusement park area in the country. They also headed to the Bowery where they could dance, drink, and socialize among their peers. Chicagoans went to the lakeshore to swim or to visit sites such as the newly built Field Museum of Natural History . In southern California, people took the electric train to Coronado and Balboa Islands.
The impact on old-world immigrant families and young women transformed the way a generation of young working-class people interacted with the opposite sex, families, and workplaces. Women negotiated their newfound freedom and economic resources. Young people could more freely mingle in public with one another. Because the homes of many workers were crowded, many individuals spent their leisure time in the streets, in public parks, or at local diners and saloons where they could meet without being under the watchful eyes of their families. Single men and women were able to go to nickelodeon shows or dance halls together, which meant more intimacy between the sexes in public places.
The cities’ elite also found new forms of entertainment. Often mimicking the European culture, benefactors created libraries, concert halls, opera houses, and museums. These cultural institutions became the pet projects of the rich and elevated their own social status and in some cases provided cultural venues for the working class. The Metropolitan Opera in New York was founded in 1880 and included the Vanderbilts, Roosevelts, and Morgans among its first subscribers.
By the end of the nineteenth century, much of the country was in upheaval, as the effects of migration, immigration, industrialization, and urbanization pressured people in their daily lives. This phenomenal interaction of people allowed for both the potential for understanding as well as the very real possibility of conflict, some of it violent. Although many fed that friction for numerous reasons including fear or prejudice, many others worked to solve the problems by joining reform movements and advocating for their causes. Nowhere were these frictions more apparent and more violent than in the upheaval that was caused by the industrialization of the U.S. workplace.
Baseball
Baseball Organizations, 1870–1992
Baseball is considered the most American of all sports. Yet baseball found its origins in a game called rounders that emerged from England and may have been a derivative of cricket. Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, baseball has become a global phenomenon that has entertained both men and women. Increasingly, Major League Baseball, which is the largest professional league in the world, reflects the globalization of the sport as athletes from around the world come to compete in the United States.
Baseball has been called “America’s Pastime,” but it in fact originated in England and then spread around the globe. Nevertheless, it is still most closely associated with the United States, which is the most lucrative market for Major League Baseball (MLB).
Baseball is derived from a game called rounders, which was played in England during the late eighteenth century and may also have been a precursor to cricket. By the early nineteenth century, Americans in the Northeast—both men and women—were playing some form of baseball as a leisure activity after work. In 1845, the New York Knickerbockers, a club of elite men, formalized the rules of what is now considered modern baseball. The first professional game was played in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1846. However, almost ten years later in 1855, the New York sports pages were still devoting more space to coverage of cricket than that of baseball.
By the late nineteenth century, baseball had taken off as a major leisure time sport among both urban and rural youth. Groups like the YMCA created youth leagues in order to provide activities for boys after school or work. John D. Rockefeller Jr. financed a baseball league in his Colorado mines. The league boasted state-of-the-art facilities, with scoreboards, spectator stands, and uniforms and stipends for the players. Mine superintendents would “trade” miners between various camps to ensure they had a championship team.
With the advent of the railway system, a professional national league developed where city teams could compete with one another despite long distances. In the 1870s, professional baseball was being played up and down the East Coast and across the Midwest. Blacks were allowed to play until 1888, when the league owners signed an agreement that imposed Jim Crow on baseball.
Engraving of a Baseball Game Between the Cincinnati Red Stockings and the Brooklyn Atlantics, 1870
This image captures the early years of baseball, in which professional teams would travel long distances in order to compete in front of ever increasing audiences. The rise in the popularity of baseball marked a moment when American workers began to have leisure time as well as extra money that they could spend to entertain themselves purely for pleasure. Baseball along with city parks, dances, and amusement parks like Coney Island provided public spaces for freedom and entertainment.
The Granger Collection, New York
Osaka Mairuchi Baseball Players Visit the White House, 1925
At the peak of the U.S.-Japanese trans-Pacific baseball exchange, the Osaka Mairuchi baseball players were invited to appear at the White House to visit with President Calvin Coolidge.
National Photo Company Collection (Library of Congress)
Advertisement for Baseball Game, 1867
This poster advertised a match for the Cuban All Star Club team, which played in Havana.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4–3227
Black baseball leagues had been in existence since the Civil War and thrived alongside white teams, often playing them, even during the Jim Crow era. In 1887, the National Colored Baseball League, known as the Negro League, was formally founded. Meanwhile, baseball was also emerging as a national sport in Cuba. In 1889, the mixed-race team, the All Cubans, toured the United States playing both Negro-league and MLB teams. These leagues developed simultaneously and spread the sport throughout the Caribbean diaspora. Finally, in April of 1947, baseball was once again desegregated when the Brooklyn Dodgers signed and played Jackie Robinson.
During the same time period, Japan was also discovering the joys of playing baseball. In 1878, Hiroshi Hiraoka returned from his studies in the United States and introduced the game to his colleagues at the Japan national railways. In Japan, baseball was played predominately at the college level. Players were amateurs but trained with an intensive physical regimen. In 1905, the MLB in conjunction with Japanese baseball leaders organized a tour of Japanese players through the United States to play semi-pro and college teams. The group collaborated on these trans-Pacific exchanges until World War II. In 1934, Japan created its first professional baseball league, now known as the Nippon Baseball League.
Baseball has also been the place of some of the most important contract decisions in U.S. labor history. In 1969, Curtis Flood challenged his trade from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies. The MLB had a reserve clause that forced a player to stay with his team throughout his career, and only the team’s management could decide where a player could play. Flood’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court where he lost. However, it shed light on the labor of baseball players who, through their union, won the right of free agency and the ability to leave a team at the end of their contracts.
Critical Thinking Questions
· What aspects of baseball have made it such a globally accepted game?
· How did the development of baseball reflect the contemporary attitudes about nationalism and racism?
16-4Industrial Violence and the Rise of Unions
This cover from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated in July 1892 depicted one of the nation’s most violent strikes in Homestead, Pennsylvania, which pitted the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel workers against the Carnegie Steel Company.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division[LC-USZ62-75205]
What is happening in this image? Why are women and children so prominently displayed? Does the illustration side with the workers or the company?
The Second Industrial Revolution that drew people from the countryside to rapidly expanding cities also transformed their workplaces and relations with their employers. A large urban industrial labor force emerged in which strangers from different ethnicities, races, and nationalities, speaking different languages, labored shoulder to shoulder. This new work environment was not just diverse; it was also communal. This was very different from farm work that was usually done alone or with just a few family members.
This gathering of workers in urban factories enabled them to find common causes against their employers. Companies were stubbornly resistant, sometimes violently, to workers’ demands. Emerging labor unions struggled for legal recognition. The courts constantly ordered unions to stop organizing workers and cease disrupting their workplaces with strikes and other forms of protest. High rates of immigration, high unemployment, and the erratic economy during the depressions of 1873 and 1893 created a “reserve army of workers” of desperate people willing to work at almost any wage. Although the surplus hurt labor organization, advocates worked tirelessly on behalf of the nation’s industrial workers, forming the basis for the dynamic growth of the U.S. labor movement.
As you read, consider why creating a strong union movement in the United States was so difficult. What challenges did they face? What benefits were accrued?
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16-4aTransformation of Work
Labor shifts from small-scale craft work to large-scale industrialized work.
Prior to the Civil War, craft unions or guilds were the predominant form of work-based organizations. Shoemakers, typesetters, and workers in many other crafts labored alone or in small workshops, providing goods and services to local communities. These workers rarely considered the condition of those not in their professional guild. Master craftsmen trained young people in a particular craft during a long apprenticeship. Most major cities had more than fifty craft unions. The craft system of production, however, collapsed with industrialization, which transformed the way work was done. Unskilled workers who had no training in a particular craft performed simple, repetitive, mechanized jobs that required little training and no apprenticeship.
Factory owners looked not only for low-wage workers but also for methods to boost their productivity, which was measured by the time it took to make goods at a set quality level. In the 1880s, Frederick Taylor decided not to attend Harvard College but to apprentice himself as a patternmaker. He observed his fellow laborers’ work inefficiencies that cost the company both time and money. As Taylor worked his way up to become a foreman, he experimented with a wide variety of ways to increase laborers’ productivity through a system that became known as scientific management , or Taylorism. His careful studies, the most famous of which broke down worker movements into discrete and timed tasks, became the basis of new work routines that greatly increased production across industries.
Although highly profitable for business owners, scientific management increased the pace of work and reduced any control that workers had over their labor. To raise profits, capitalists sought to keep wages low, the workday long, and the workplace devoid of expensive safety precautions. In the face of these working conditions, unions emerged in industrialized nations around the world. Treated like expendable cogs in the wheels of industrial profit, workers responded by turning to labor unions that negotiated for better wages, hours, and work conditions. Strikes, which were illegal at the time, were among the few tools that gave workers leverage against owners. U.S. labor leaders drew inspiration from British and European intellectuals and working-class reformers.
Three ideologies imported from across the Atlantic gained particular hold among U.S. workers. Anarchism , a broad set of radical ideas that pushed for a stateless society in which workers would govern themselves and not be subject to profit-seeking capitalists, appealed to the most radical workers. Syndicalism , which was associated with anarchism, advocated that workers organize themselves into small confederations and resist state power and the capitalist class. Socialism , in opposition to the other two ideologies, called for the state to cooperatively own industries and manage them collectively. First in Paris and then in London, the German émigré Karl Marx with Friedrich Engels developed widely influential theories about the role of economics and the class conflicts in world historical development. Engels published Das Kapital, Volume II espousing those theories. Many European immigrants were exposed to anarchist, syndicalist, and socialist ideas in their homelands and provided a key constituency for radical movements in the United States. With the exception of socialism, however, radical alternatives to capitalism did not win a mass following, and most Americans remained wedded to democratic and republican ideals.
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16-4bKnights of Labor
The labor movement becomes a national economic and political force.
The first nationwide confrontation between labor and capital came during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. In the wake of the Panic of 1873 and the Hayes-Tilden contested presidential election of 1876, tensions ran high as Americans struggled financially and were uneasy about the partisan conflict that had wracked the Union. Since 1874, there had been strikes and labor violence throughout the country as the depression caused businesses to reduce workers’ hours, cut wages, and ultimately lay off employees. At least eighteen thousand companies failed during the depression, including 89 percent of the nation’s 364 railroad firms. In July 1877, workers at the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) railroad in Martinsburg, West Virginia, went on strike spurred by the third in a series of pay cuts. B&O workers in Maryland stopped working and joined the West Virginians in the strike. The shipping of freight across the country came to a halt as newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes called in the U.S. military to protect the nation from “insurrection.” In Baltimore, federal troops fired on a crowd of protestors, killing eleven and leaving forty injured (see Map 16.3).
Map 16.3Sites of Industrial Violence in the United States
Between the 1890s and the 1920s, major– and often violent—labor conflicts erupted throughout the United State’s industrial centers. These strikes and uprisings attained only limited reforms.
Hayes’s heavy-handed response enraged workers and the public at large. Within weeks, the strike spread to railroad workers in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Missouri. The peak of violence occurred in Pittsburgh where federal troops opened fire on strikers and their families, killing twenty people, including one woman and three small children. As news of the deaths spread through the town, Pittsburgh was thrown into turmoil. Striking workers set the Pennsylvania Railroad on fire. By morning, the roundhouse was burned to the ground, and twenty residents and five soldiers lay dead. In just over twenty-four hours, almost forty people had been killed in Pittsburgh.
After forty-five days, the Great Railroad Strike ended without any tangible gains for the workers. Yet it revealed the ability of unions to reach across local and state regions in their labor disputes. It also generated deep concerns about the threat of labor cooperation to the nation’s economy among government officials and the U.S. public in general. Some worried that ideas from European labor movements, particularly the Paris Commune of 1871 , a brief takeover of the French government by anarchists, would spread to the United States. Consequently, much of the nativist rhetoric against immigrants often focused on labor movements as conduits for the influx of radical ideas about politics and labor rights.
The power and influence of the Knights continued through the early 1880s and peaked in 1886. That year, the union boasted almost a million workers as it advocated for better wages and safer working conditions. The Knights also joined the nationwide push to shorten the workday to eight hours, which would have given workers more rest and free time outside the rigidly controlled workplaces. The union used the slogan “Eight Hours for What We Will.” U.S. workers did not want to be “wage slaves” to capitalist employers.
The struggle over the eight-hour day came to a peak in Chicago in May 1886. On May 1, Albert Parsons, a leading labor and anarchist thinker, and his wife Lucy Parsons led a group of eighty thousand marchers through the streets of Chicago demanding the eight-hour workday. The demonstration was without incident. But two days later, when the protesters gathered in Haymarket Square outside the McCormick Reaper Works, violence broke out when police beat workers and fatally shot two men. Protesting the killings, Albert Spies, editor of a local working-class newspaper, called for a gathering on Haymarket Square the following night. The crowd was relatively small, but as people were leaving, a bomb exploded, killing seven policeman and four civilians. In the violence that ensued, dozens were injured.
In the aftermath of the Haymarket bombings, the police arrested eight anarchists including Spies and Parsons on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. After a trial in which no evidence was presented that linked the eight men to the actual bomb, they were all convicted and sentenced to death. Four of them, including Spies and Parsons, were hanged and one committed suicide. But, in 1893, the governor of Illinois pardoned the remaining three men.
Battle after the Explosion of a Bomb at Haymarket Square, Chicago, May 4, 1886
This image appeared in a Chicago newspaper just days after the violence in Haymarket Square. Note how the engraving conveys the sense of confusion and chaos. The Haymarket bombing was a turning point for labor organizing in the United States, as the Knights of Labor, although they had nothing to do with the bombing, came to be viewed by the American public as too radical. Not until the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) emerged in 1905 was there such a broadly based union moement.
Archive Photos/Getty Images
Although there was significant doubt about the guilt of the accused Haymarket bombers, the damage had been done. The radical labor movement, symbolized by the Knights of Labor, became unpopular. Americans refused to embrace a labor movement that could turn violent and seemingly had ties to radical Communist, anarchist, and even socialist political views, all of which seemed foreign and un-American. The United States had little room for a union movement that was not enmeshed in the republican and democratic principles of the nation. Any hint of European radical influence doomed any labor organization.
Local, state, and federal government stepped up their efforts to suppress labor agitation by increasing local police forces, state militias, and national guard units. Business owners responded by opposing the eight-hour-a-day movement and hiring private police forces such as the Pinkerton Detective Agency to undermine labor organizing. Reaction to the Haymarket bombing resulted in antilabor, anti-immigrant, and anti-Communist rhetoric that was often associated with critiques of the working classes. Even though the Knights of Labor denounced the use of violence and disassociated themselves from Parsons and the others, the union suffered from anti-union efforts, and its numbers declined radically. By 1890, the Knights’ membership had plummeted from almost 1 million in the 1870s to one hundred thousand.
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16-4cAge of Strikes
Labor conflict continues and peaks through a series of new strikes.
Into the void left by the collapse of the Knights of Labor stepped the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Founded in 1886 by Samuel Gompers, an English-born cigar maker, it was the umbrella organization for numerous craft unions of skilled workers. Gompers distrusted government officials, who, he argued, served the interests of capitalists through legislation, tax breaks, the use of federal troops, and, most troublesome, court injunctions against strikes. A much more conservative union than the Knights, the AFL divided, rather than united, workers across trades, skill levels, and races. It excluded blacks, Chinese, and other nonwhite workers from its ranks and never organized women. The AFL was not interested in creating one big union to revolutionize society, choosing instead to advocate only for the “bread and butter” issues for the benefit of its own members. This type of conservative unionism was known as business unionism . The AFL was not opposed to going on strike and challenging the capitalist system to improve wages and work conditions, but it rejected radical ideas about overthrowing the capitalist system or establishing a worker’s democracy that displaced business owners.
Frick canceled contract renewal negotiations with the Amalgamated, declaring that he would negotiate only with individual workers. He then hired three hundred Pinkerton agents to patrol the mill’s perimeter, which he had lined with three miles of twelve-foot steel fence topped with barbed wire. The workers labeled the mill Fort Frick. On July 2, Frick locked out the workers, closed the mill, and stated that he would reopen it with nonunionized labor. The Amalgamated, which was part of a tight-knit community in Pittsburgh, mobilized the entire town against Frick, barring strikebreakers and resources from entering or exiting the mill. Frick reacted by sending heavily armed Pinkertons who arrived on barges from the river to take over the mill. In the twelve-hour battle that ensued, nine strikers and three Pinkerton agents were killed. Scores more were injured when the strikers’ families fought back against the Pinkertons, who eventually surrendered.
The win at Homestead was short lived because Frick, with the aid of the Pennsylvania militia, by November 1892 had secured the mill and resumed production without union labor. By Christmas of that year, the union had surrendered to the inevitable. Frick cabled Carnegie: “Our Victory is now complete and more gratifying. Do not think we will ever have any serious labor trouble again.” The defeat was devastating to not only the Homestead community but also the national labor movement (see Table 16.2). What chance did other smaller, less-organized, and poorly funded unions have against corporations such as Carnegie Steel if Amalgamated could not stand up to them?
Table 16.2
Selected Unions Worldwide, to 1925
As indicated in this table, the drive to unionize workers was a global movement throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early unions, such as the Stonemasons in Australia and the guilds in the United States, organized according to the type of work. Later unions, beginning with the Knights of Labor and Great Britain’s International Workingmen’s Association, were organized regardless of type of work and coalesced around ideas of a laboring class that opposed the capitalist class and management. Leaders in labor unions across the globe were in contact and shared ideas and tactics about how to advance labor’s cause.
|
Year |
Country |
Name |
|
1855 |
Australia |
Stonemasons Society |
|
1864 |
Great Britain |
International Workingmen’s Association |
|
1869 |
United States |
Knights of Labor |
|
1886 |
United States |
American Federation of Labor |
|
1890 |
United States |
United Mine Workers of America |
|
1892 |
Germany |
Generalkommission der Gewerkschaften Deutschlands |
|
1893 |
United States |
American Railway Workers Union |
|
1897 |
Japan |
Metalworkers Union |
|
1900 |
United States |
International Ladies Garment Workers Union |
|
1905 |
United States |
International Workers of the World |
|
1925 |
China |
All-China Federation of Trade Unions |
The American Railway Union (ARU) under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs built itself on the base of the Knights of Labor. In 1893, it was the fastest-growing union with increasing political power. The ARU’s opportunity came when workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company struck. Pullman was well known for its company town just south of Chicago that housed its workers and their families in a controlled environment that included curfews and payment of goods from company-owned stores in company scrip, not cash. Although some people admired the high quality of housing and schooling for children, many workers resented the company’s oversight on their lives. One worker complained, “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shop, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman church, and when we die we shall be buried in the Pullman cemetery and go to the Pullman hell.” In April 1894, George Pullman, in response to global depression, laid off 33 percent of his workforce and reduced wages by 25 to 40 percent for those fortunate enough to retain their jobs. However, he did not reduce the rents or the prices charged at the company store. Workers responded by going on strike. They asked the ARU to support them and in response, its leader Debs asked that railway workers nationwide refuse to handle any trains that had Pullman cars. More than a quarter of a million workers across the nation complied and practically stopped train traffic.
Global Americans
The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives int he ILR School at Cornell University
In 1903, seventeen-year-old Clara Lemlich and her family fled a Ukrainian pogrom and immigrated to the United States. She grew up speaking Yiddish, a Germanic language written in Hebrew, but taught herself to read Russian and became well read in radical and revolutionary literature. By the time she immigrated to New York, she was a committed socialist. She eventually joined the U.S. Communist Party.
In New York, her family settled in the Lower East Side, and she quickly found work in one of the shirtwaist factories as a seamstress. She became involved in labor, joined the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), and was elected to its executive board. She was a vigorous and fearless leader. After a strike in 1909 when she had been beaten by police, suffering two broken ribs, she was arrested but returned the next day to the picket line.
In November 1909, thousands of shirtwaist workers and supporters gathered at The Cooper Union to discuss striking. After listening to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) leader speak, Lemlich was literally lifted to the stage and stated, "I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I make a motion that we go out in a general strike.” The crowd responded enthusiastically to call the strike, which became known as the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand.
By the turn of the century, as more women entered the workforce, they began to form their own unions and fight their own battles to secure safer conditions and higher wages. A coalition of women garment workers, most of whom were recent immigrants from southern Europe and Russia and many of whom were Jewish, founded the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in 1900. All of these women, regardless of their background, worked in extremely difficult and unsafe conditions. They often brought their experiences with trade unionism and socialism from their home countries. In 1903, the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), which had been founded in Great Britain thirty years earlier, was started in the United States as an affiliate of the AFL. The WTUL was often considered the more conservative of the two unions, but together they led the largest and most successful strikes.
The unions slowly gained membership but did not grow rapidly until 1909 when a general strike swept New York City. The workers were responding to protests by garment workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. A young Jewish activist, Clara Lemlich, spoke to a packed house at The Cooper Union and called for a general strike of garment workers. More than twenty thousand workers heeded her call and walked off their jobs for more than fourteen weeks. The long conflict was difficult because the police brutalized the strikers and arrested them. The brutality eased only when the mink brigade , a group of wealthy and middle-class women who included Anne Morgan, the daughter of banking magnate J.P. Morgan, and Frances Perkins, joined the picket line. The strike resulted in a contract for the unionized workers. One of the few holdouts was the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, which refused to sign a union contract.
A little more than a year later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was again the center of labor agitation. On a beautiful spring afternoon, a fire broke out on the ninth floor of the building. The flames spread so rapidly that few of the women were able to escape. Dozens of them died when they jumped from the windows to the pavement as horrified onlookers watched, unable to help. Within an hour, 146 people died, 123 of whom were women. The youngest victims were fourteen years old. It became known later that the women had been locked into the shop, which was a common practice meant to keep workers from taking breaks. The next week, in one of the largest parades in the city’s history, New Yorkers mourned the workers’ deaths and agitated for reform. In response to the tragedy, New York City created a committee on public safety and passed laws to protect workers and improve building conditions.
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16-4dLabor Organization in the West
Western labor unions concentrate on mining.
The UMWA created a coalition of skilled and unskilled laborers from all over the world. By 1910, it had organized almost one-third of all miners across the United States, which had been a herculean task given the scope of workers involved. Tensions between mine owners and workers ran high throughout the turn of the century in places such as Bingham Canyon, Utah, and Cripple Creek, Colorado, but the conflict climaxed in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1913.
John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) had resisted union organization throughout the early part of the twentieth century. Despite CF&I’s best efforts, the UMWA under the leadership of John R. Lawson and Mother Jones launched a successful union organizational drive and called a strike against Rockefeller’s network of coal mines throughout Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. The UMWA also shut down his Minnequa Steel works in Pueblo, Colorado. In retaliation, Rockefeller’s managers in Colorado evicted workers and their families from their homes in the middle of winter. The UMWA then leased a piece of land at Ludlow to set up a tent colony for the displaced workers, who continued the strike.
On a cold April morning in 1914, a coalition of company men, Pinkerton agents, and the Colorado national guard surrounded the tent encampment. An armed battle ensued throughout the day, and a fire swept through the worker’s temporary homes. The fire killed eighteen women and children. The nation was outraged at the site of dead women and children who had been cowering in a dug-out cellar trying to escape the violence. CF&I and the Rockefeller family in particular were vilified, which prompted Congress to scrutinize the family and its labor practices. Although no major legislation came out of the tragedy, Rockefeller pushed fellow business leaders such as Henry Ford and E.I. DuPont to reconsider the relationship between labor and capital. They implemented company unions and reforms to improve working conditions for their employees and living conditions for their families while maintaining paternalist control and denying workers the right to engage in collective bargaining.
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