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6. AMERICA COMES OF AGE

CULTURAL-SPIRITUAL CHALLENGES OF THE INDUSTRIAL AGE

CONTENTS

A rapidly growing America

The American Labor Movement

The American women's or feminist movement

Trust-Busting

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 172-175.
A RAPIDLY GROWING AMERICA

From one perspective, America – as it stepped from the 1800s into the 1900s – was going through an amazing period of development.  In only a couple of generations Americans had gone from horseback to automobiles, and even to flight.  Electricity lit up not only cities but also homes, news of the larger world arrived almost instantly to an increasingly attentive population, personal phones put people in direct communication with each other across even the miles, and wealth reached down into even the middle classes, who knew that they were living better than kings and queens had lived only a few centuries earlier.  All this change was very heady stuff.

Also the American population itself was undergoing very rapid growth in numbers, with accompanying social changes.  In the forty-year period between 1870 to 1910 the population went from 38.5 million to 92.3 million, growing by about 25 percent each decade (28 percent by 1880, another 27.6 percent by 1890, and another 21 percent for each of 1900 and 1910).  This time period also marked a huge shift in the nation's demography, 10 to 11 million (figures are not exact) Americans moving from farms to America's fast-rising cities, where they were joined by another 25 million immigrants streaming in from Europe.

This movement was not always a happy event, but one normally necessitated by the need to find life-support in a physical or geographic world that itself had expanded none.  Things were getting tight.  And poverty was an accompanying feature of this tightness or scarcity of opportunity.  And things were merely growing worse with time.

THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT

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.

[1]At a gathering of workers at Haymarket Square in Chicago who were demanding the eight-hour working day, an unknown person threw a bomb at police who were in the process of dispersing the crowd, killing seven officers and a number of civilians.  On the basis of scanty or non-existent evidence seven (mostly German) anarchists were sentenced to death by hanging (a number of them had not even been present at the gathering) for their contribution to the tragedy.  Only four were actually hanged, as one committed suicide in jail and the two others had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment, but were pardoned by the Illinois governor in 1893 who (as did many) considered the trial a total travesty of justice.

[2]Such political caution and patriotism was clearly demonstrated during World War One, and in its opposition to the more radical (mostly immigrant) labor organizations such as the “Wobblies” (the Industrial Workers of the World) and the more radical Socialist Party.

THE AMERICAN WOMEN'S OR FEMINIST MOVEMENT

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]

[3]Some of the Western states, Wyoming (1869), Utah (1870) Colorado (1893), Idaho (1896), had already taken the lead in this, prior to the end of the 1800s.

TRUST-BUSTING

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.



Go on to the next section:  The Rationalizing of Western Culture

  Miles H. Hodges