Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (45 page)

One of the most colorful of Tammany’s sachems was George Washington Plunkitt, who once instructed a newspaper reporter on the distinction between “honest” and “dishonest” graft. “There’s an honest graft,” said Plunkitt, “and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: ‘I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.’ . . . I’m tipped off, say, that they are going to lay out a new park at a certain place. . . . I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can and then there is a rush to get my land. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft.”

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H
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S
. WICKS,
witness to the Great Oklahoma Land Rush (April 22, 1889):

On the morning of April 23, a city of 10,000 people, 500 houses, and innumerable tents existed where twelve hours before was nothing but a broad expanse of prairie. The new city changed its appearance every twenty-four hours, as day by day the work of construction went on. The tents were rapidly superseded by small frame structures, until at the end of a month there were scarcely any tents to be seen. The small frame structures in turn gave place to larger ones, and a number of fine two-story frame buildings were erected on the principal thoroughfares before the end of sixty days.

Wicks described the birth of the city of Guthrie, Oklahoma. Enid and Oklahoma City were also begun that day. The land rush was the result of the federal government opening up lands under the Homestead Act. Fifty thousand prospective settlers waited until noon of April 22 when the rush began and they could stake a claim to a homestead. Many other people had already jumped the gun—they would be called Sooners. The land had been opened up by confiscating territory from the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) who had been relocated there during the removals earlier in the nineteenth century (see Chapter 3, “What Was the Trail of Tears?”). These Indians had made the unfortunate decision to side with the Confederacy during the Civil War.

What happened at Haymarket Square?

While the wealth piled higher in the houses of Morgan and Rockefeller, the working men and women of America fell deeper and deeper into poverty, victimized by the periodic depressions of the late nineteenth century. The forces of labor were slow to organize, confronted by the combined power of the businessmen and banks working in league with state and federal governments. Unions also had to contend with the natural difficulties of organizing workers who did not all speak the same language and were suspicious of one another. The Irish hated the Italians. The Germans hated the Irish. They all hated the Chinese. And, of course, blacks were beyond the pale to most white workers. The idea of integrated unions was unspeakable to white workingmen, most of whom were preoccupied with fighting for jobs rather than with obtaining decent wages and safer conditions.

But small gains had been made. In 1860, shoe workers in Lynn, Massachusetts, organized a strike on Washington’s Birthday. At their peak, the strikers numbered 10,000 workers marching through the city. While refusing to recognize the union, the factory owners conceded on wages, and it counted as the first real victory in American labor history.

It would be a long time before labor could claim another one. The post–Civil War period was littered with the bodies of strikers who were killed by strikebreakers, hired guards, or soldiers. Among those worst off were coal miners, who faced nightmarish dangers for pennies. In 1875, in Pennsylvania, a group of Irish coal miners organized as the Molly Maguires, taking their name from an Irish revolutionary organization. Infiltrated by an informer, the Molly Maguires were accused of violence, leading to the execution of nineteen members of the group.

Two years later, in 1877, there were massive railroad strikes spreading across the country, brought on by wage cuts imposed on workers already laboring twelve hours a day for low pay. By the time this wave of strikes was over, more than a hundred people had died and a thousand strikers were jailed. But the idea of organized labor had begun to take root, and the first generation of powerful national unions was emerging. The first was the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, begun in 1869, which quickly acquired a large measure of political and negotiating power. In 1884, robber baron Jay Gould suffered the indignity of bargaining at the same table with the Knights, whose membership blossomed to more than 700,000. But the history of the Knights would end in smoking disaster.

In Chicago, in 1886, the Knights of Labor were involved in a strike to force an eight-hour workday. On May 3, 1886, strikebreakers at the McCormick Reaper Company were attacked by striking workers, and police fired on the crowd, killing six and wounding dozens more. The next day, several thousand people gathered at Haymarket Square to protest the police action. As the police arrived to break up the rally, a bomb was thrown into their midst, killing seven officers.

Although there was no real evidence, blame fell on anarchist labor leaders. Anarchists were those who believed in the replacement of government with free cooperation among individuals. Fears of anarchist cells in America’s cities incited a wave of panic across the country. Within months, several anarchist labor leaders were tried and quickly convicted. Some of them were hanged, and others received life sentences. (In 1893, three surviving anarchists still in prison were pardoned by German-born governor John Altgeld, who was convinced of their innocence but committed political suicide with the pardon.) Tarred with the anarchist brush after the Haymarket Square riot, the Knights of Labor were badly discredited. By 1890, their membership had fallen to 100,000.

Their place would be filled by two more powerful leaders, Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) and Samuel Gompers (1850–1924). Debs’s labor career began with work as a locomotive fireman—a dirty, dangerous job, as was almost all railroad work of the period. Thousands of workers were killed or maimed each year in accidents and boiler explosions. In the midst of another severe economic depression in 1893, Debs organized the militant American Railway Union, which absorbed remnants of the Knights of Labor and called for a strike in 1894 against the Pullman Car Company. Since Pullman cars were to be found on almost every train in the country, the strike soon became national in scope. The strike peaked when 60,000 railworkers went out, and the federal government, at the railways’ behest, stepped in. Attorney General Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, declared that the strike interfered with federal mails; the Supreme Court agreed, and President Grover Cleveland called out troops to suppress the strike. After a pitched battle in Chicago, in which strikers were killed, Debs was arrested and jailed for contempt of court. He later joined the Socialist Party and ran for president five times.

Cigarmaker Samuel Gompers played it far more safely. Making the sweatshops of the Lower East Side of New York his base, Gompers wasn’t interested in utopian dreams of improving society. Rather than organizing for political ends, Gompers stuck to “bread and butter” issues such as hours, wages, and safety, organizing the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as a collection of skilled craft unions. Presiding over the AFL almost continuously from 1886 to 1924, Gompers used the strike fiercely and effectively, winning eight-hour days, five- and six-day work weeks, employer liability, mine safety reforms, and, above all, maintaining the right of collective bargaining, a term that is accepted entirely today, but that reeked of Communism when it was introduced. The AFL’s effectiveness in working for laborers’ specific interests rather than for the broad social changes sought by anarchists or Socialists showed in its growth. With about 150,000 members in 1886, the union passed the million-member mark in 1901.

They were impressive gains, but they might have been larger. The federation had a great shortcoming, however, that hurt it morally and probably reduced its effectiveness in the long run. The AFL had hung out a sign that read “No Colored Need Apply.”

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SAMUEL GOMPERS
(1894):

Year by year man’s liberties are trampled underfoot at the bidding of corporations and trusts, rights are invaded and law perverted. In all ages wherever a tyrant has shown himself he has always found some willing judge to clothe that tyranny in the robes of legality, and modern capitalism has proven no exception to the rule.

You may not know that the labor movement as represented by the trades unions, stands for right, stands for justice, for liberty. You may not imagine that the issuance of an injunction depriving men of a legal as well as a natural right to protect themselves, their wives, their little ones, must fail of its purpose. Repression or oppression never yet succeeded in crushing the truth or redressing a wrong.

Who were the Populists?

While organized labor inched painfully toward acceptance, the other people who suffered most from the economic upheavals of the period were the farmers. The millions of small farmers, principally in America’s West and South, were at the mercy of many forces besides the weather that they were unable to control: eastern banks controlled credit; manufacturing monopolies controlled the price of machinery; eastern railroad trusts set freight prices; depression wiped out land values and sent crop prices spiraling downward. With the population booming and mechanization increasing farm efficiency, it should have been a time of plenty. Instead, farmers were being squeezed tighter and tighter, forced to sell their lands at panic prices and move to factory jobs in the cities.

But a backlash set in, producing a wave of farm belt radicalism that swept the country. Locally it produced farmers’ organizations called Granges that gained sufficient political clout to press for reforms, although many of these, like the Interstate Commerce Commission, proved to be unloaded guns in the war against monopolies. In the South, for the first time since the end of the Civil War, poor blacks and working-class white farmers began to see that they shared common problems and interests, and the beginnings of an alliance of black and white farmers emerged. The farmers also reached out to join with city workers to form a powerful new alliance that could transform American politics.

Meeting in St. Louis in 1892, the Grangers and remnants of the Knights of Labor organized the People’s, or Populist, Party. In a national convention later that year, the Populists put together a platform calling for national ownership of railroads and telegraph and telephone systems, a system of keeping nonperishable crops off the market, and a graduated income tax. Their platform was an eloquent indictment of the times: “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized. . . . The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced. . . . The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few. . . . From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.”

These weren’t the rantings of wild-eyed college kids who had just read Karl Marx. The Populists were working-class, backbone-of America types who had been pushed too far by the excesses of business in league with government. The men in power did not watch idly. In the South, Democrats undermined the Populist organizing effort by heightening racial fears. The mass of urban workers were never drawn to Populism, preferring to deal with the Democratic machines that they thought were defending their interests. In the election of 1892, in which Democrat Grover Cleveland recaptured the White House he’d lost four years earlier to Benjamin Harrison, the Populists finished a distant third. But the Populists still made strides as a third party, especially in the farm belt states, where they captured state legislatures, a governorship, and a substantial number of congressional seats in 1894. The two major parties realized that these farmers were a force to be reckoned with.

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Populist organizer
MARY ELIZABETH LEASE
(1890):

What you farmers need to do is raise less corn and more Hell!

What was the Cross of Gold?

During the next few years the real issues raised by the Populist Party were drowned in an obscure argument over currency. By 1895, the conflict over gold versus silver coins had absorbed all political debate in the country. “Free silver” became the new Populist rallying cry, a demand to return America to a standard using both silver and gold coins. To many Populists, this simplistic response to the depression brought about by a panic in 1893 seemed to be a cure-all. But it was a diversion that camouflaged the serious economic problems confronting the country, and it sapped much of the Populist Party’s energy.

President Cleveland was a staunch supporter of the gold standard. But when federal gold reserves fell to near-bankruptcy levels in 1896 and Cleveland had to turn to J. P. Morgan for a bailout, his political life was finished. Morgan and his associates turned around and sold off at an enormous profit the government bonds they had received, and Cleveland was seen as a Morgan puppet, which, in the public eye, was no different from being in league with the devil.

With Cleveland politically dead, some Democrats saw the Populist manifesto as a way to hold on to the White House. A young delegate-at-large from Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) spotted the political gold to be found in the “free silver” cry, and he seized the moment.