6. AMERICA COMES OF AGE

CULTURAL-SPIRITUAL CHALLENGES OF THE INDUSTRIAL AGE

Actually, Americans had begun to take action against this mounting socio-economic crisis years earlier, with the founding in 1869 of the organization, Knights of Labor, originally a union of skilled workers, designed to protect their professional positions in the face of the invasion of masses of unskilled workers (farm boys mostly) into their industrial world.  But over time it broadened its membership and pushed for specific items, such as the 8-hour working day ... reaching nearly 30,000 in membership by 1880, 100,000 by 1884, and 800,000 by 1886 ... involving around 20% of America's industrial workers.

But then a number of things would bring this organization to rapid decline after that.  Its leadership was not skilled in organizational matters.  It was heavily Catholic in membership, and drew the opposition of the Catholic hierarchy because of its secretive ways.  Also, Chinese laborers were always glad to take the place of the workers when they went on strike for their 8-hour day program.  And the organization could not find support within the American press, which depicted it as being merely a group of anarchists.  Ultimately, it was most unfairly depicted as the cause of the 1886 Haymarket Square Riot^[1], undercutting the organization's reputation so badly that by the time of the 1893 Panic it had become only a very small operation.

The organizing of American labor was subsequently taken up by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) founded that pivotal year of 1886 by Samuel Gompers as a result of a dispute with the Knights of Labor over competing labor contracts.  It united a number of guilds or unions of skilled workers and craftsmen (as opposed to common day laborers) – beginning with the cigar makers' unions.  Then as the Knights of Labor faded away during the later 1880s, the AFL held steady, even picking up new members.

Overall, it supported the idea of capitalism, simply attempting to put skilled workers in a better position to take advantage of the huge profits being accumulated in the industrial revolution sweeping America.  Also, its political caution, and distinct patriotism^[2] helped bring the U.S. government alongside the AFL in support of its labor program.  By 1920, the AFL had grown to nearly four million members.

George Pullman – owner of the Pullman Palace Car Co.
(specializing in private luxury cars for the very wealthy
American elite)

One of George Pullman's Pullman Palace Car Co. 
private luxury cars – The Countess
Library of Congress

Federal troops sent to Chicago by President Cleveland to break
the Pullman strike – 1894
Library of Congress

Deputies awaiting strikers at the Williamsburg Sugar Plant – 1910
Library of Congress LC-B2-2045-6

Ladies Tailors strikers – 1910
Library of Congress

Woolen mill strikers at Lawrence, Massachusetts menace 
strike-breakers – 1912
Library of Congress

Woolen mill strikers at Lawrence, Massachusetts confronted 
by state militia – 1912
Library of Congress

A huge stimulus to a new women's movement spread across America was alcohol, and the devastation it caused in so many American families, as husbands would spend what little earnings they achieved drowning their labor sorrows on payday at the local bar, arriving home tipsy and with most of their earnings gone.  And thus the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was born in 1874, ultimately striving not for temperance in the drinking of alcohol (a long-standing Christian virtue) but instead for total abstinence (not at all part of the Christian tradition, but soon to be treated as an absolute Christian law).

But the women's movement moved further, to demand for women the right to vote (women's suffrage), at first to give the women the political leverage they would need to perform their all-important task of protecting their families.  But then it became increasingly clear to the more active in the women's movement that women should have the same rights as men in all capacities – publicly as well as privately.  It was time to end the idea that the public domain was strictly the man's world. Thus the founding in 1890 of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, with long-standing suffragist Susan B. Anthony heading up the organization.  But it would take another 30 years of marches and other forms of protest to finally secure the right of women to vote in every American election with the 19th Amendment which went into effect in 1920.^[3]

 

Other Americans found themselves greatly distressed at how America's capacity to create enormous industrial wealth was held in the hands of only a tiny group of Americans – and how industrialism was also degrading so many people to the status of serfs.  Americans (and immigrants) were being forced by rising economic circumstances to have to leave the open-air work of farming and submit themselves to lives underground in America's mines and inside the sweatshops of America's factories.  The work was grueling, paid little, and – to Progressivists – was totally dehumanizing.  Indeed, alcohol was becoming the sole source of relief for desperate workers – but also the growing cause of the ruin of America's industrial working-class families.  Something needed to be done to save America's soul!  Thus it was that "trust-busting" would be a key feature of this new spirit stirring Americans to action on numerous fronts.

The Rationalizing of Western Culture

  Miles H. Hodges