Chapter 66: The Revolt of Labor
At the end of the 19th Century, workers throughout the world were fighting increasingly bitter, bloody battles against their capitalist bosses and the governments protecting them. In this episode, we will cover such topics as:
Worker internationalism
The Paris Commune
The Great Upheaval of 1877
The Haymarket Massacre
The Homestead and Pullman strikes
The Belgian General Strike of 1893
And more!
Sources for this episode include:
Adamcyzk, Joseph. “Homestead Strike: United States history.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: 4 Mar 2020. https://www.britannica.com/money/topic/Homestead-Strike
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
“American Socialist.” Throughline. NPR. 19 Mar 2020. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/817837651
Beatty, Jack. Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900. Vintage Books. 2007.
Delalande, Nicolas. Struggle and Mutual Aid: The Age of Worker Solidarity. Trans. by Anthony Roberts. Other Press. 2023.
Duncan, Mike. “Revolutions.” Season 8. 2018.
Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, The First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America. Anchor Books. 2006.
Gompers, Samuel. Seventy Years of Life and Labor: An Autobiography. E.P. Dutton & Co. 1925.
Jamieson, Patrick C. “Foreign Criticisms of the 1871 Paris Commune: The Role of British and American Newspapers and Periodicals.” intersections 11, no. 1 (2010): 100-115. https://depts.washington.edu/chid/intersections_Summer_2010/Jamieson.xhtml
Klarman, Michael J. “The Judges versus the Unions: The Development of British Labor Law, 1867-1913.” Virginia Law Review, vol. 75, no. 8, 1989, pp. 1487–602.
Morris, Charles R. The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy. Henry Holt and Co. 2005.
Polasky, Janet L. “A Revolution for Socialist Reforms: The Belgian General Strike for Universal Suffrage.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 27, no. 3, 1992, pp. 449–66.
Starr, Kevin. California: A History. Modern Library. 2005.
Stearns, Peter N. The Industrial Revolution in World History. 4th Edition. Westview Press. 2013.
Urofsky, Melvin. “Pullman Strike: United States history.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: 1 Sept 2023. https://www.britannica.com/money/topic/Pullman-Strike
Full Transcript
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“Within my span of life have come inventions that have been revolutionizing in effect. Electricity both for lighting and power, the telephone, the wireless, the submarine cable, the radio, the transcontinental railroad, aeroplane, electric street cars, internal combustion engine, cold storage, are a few of the changes that I have seen come. Methods of work, methods and agencies of communication, and facilities for travel have brought society so close together that merging of economic interests and activities has been an inevitable result. The consolidation came so gradually that many did not see the trend of development until some of the new trusts were exercising their newly found and rapacious powers...The trust movement came with the development of quantity production. In their infancy these Gargantuan creatures were conscious only of their power and were unrestrained by ethics or experiences. They developed with ruthless disregard of competitors and without understanding or care for the human agents that were necessary in developing the network of creative force necessary to make the economic structure a going machine. The trusts and the large-scale industries generally made the mistake of thinking they could treat employees as impersonally as they did material things. The corporation form of ownership had replaced the system of individual ownership and personal management. Expansion of credit revolutionized methods of financing. The early trust seemed only a devouring monster for those without practical industrial experience.”
That is from the 1925 autobiography of American labor leader Samuel Gompers.
Born into a Jewish immigrant family in London’s East End in 1850, Gompers emigrated to the United States as a teenager and took up work as a cigarmaker in New York City. Almost immediately, he joined Local 15 of the Cigar Makers International Union.
Not only did he learn his trade, he also learned about the political and economic radicalism of the Trade Union movement back in Europe. But Gompers was never really sold on it. In the same paragraph in which he notes the “ruthless disregard” of modern corporations, he writes:
“The change brought danger to the individual workers until they learned to protect their individual rights and opportunities through organized activity in groups. The trust was a part of this general movement to associated effort that is a distinctive feature of our present economic organization. The trade union movement is labor's constructive contribution to democratic regulation of large scale production. I believe that industry can devise and operate economic principles of administration that will result in constructive control and continuous progress. So I hold that trusts should not be suppressed, but regulated and helped to develop constructive control.”
In the late 19th Century, the labor movement was at a crossroads. And with so much economic change underway across so much of the planet, workers took different approaches to advancing their cause.
In the Spring of 1867, riots broke out in the French industrial city of Roubaix near the Belgian border. In several mills, the local French and Belgian workers were told they’d need to start manning two power looms at a time, instead of one. Furious, the workers held demonstrations to protest the new policy, and those demonstrations turned violent. In the chaos, several mills were looted, the machines were smashed, and buildings were set ablaze.
But by now, the ethos of the Luddites had largely become a thing of the past. In a letter to them, Parisian bronze workers scolded their Roubaix brothers for their actions. “However justified your complaints, nothing can justify the destructive acts of which you are guilty. The machine, which is the tool you work with, should be sacred to you; acts of violence such as these endanger your own cause and that of all other workers.”
This decline of Luddism within the labor movement coincided with the rise of modern Trade Unionism.
That same Spring, a commission was set up in London to investigate the so-called “Sheffield Outrages” – an unsettling series of stories about violent coercion used by union steelworkers against non-union steelworkers during strikes. But this commission would also explore the organizational nature of trade unions. You see, Britain’s high court had recently determined that – while collective bargaining was legal, thanks to the 1824 law I told you about back in Chapter 42 – trade unions still disrupted trade, and therefore their legal formations were illegitimate. In other words, they had no legal basis to elect officers, collect dues, and create strike funds.
The Commission was split, with a majority siding against the unions. But it was the recommendations issued by the commission’s minority that were soon enacted. In 1871, the Liberal government of Prime Minister William Gladstone passed a new Trade Union Act. It would be the first of several laws over the next few decades that provided the framework necessary for unions to organize, strike, and more. As a result, the UK became by far the most union-friendly country of the Second Industrial Revolution.
Throughout the rest of the world, though, the labor movement struggled under hostile governments, uneven economic development, and stubborn employers. And in this increasingly globalized age of free trade and international migration (shout out Chapter 54) British workers could still feel the pain experienced by workers in foreign lands. If the costs of production were too high in Britian, because of unions driving up wages, merchants could simply import low-cost goods from union-hostile countries. And if that wasn’t an option – if they relied too much on machinery and resources only available in Britain – capitalists could literally import non-union workers to conduct the labor. Known as “blacklegs”, these foreign scabs undercut the demands of British unions throughout the mid-19th Century.
Thus, like the forces of capital, the forces of labor would need to globalize. International solidarity was now urgently needed.
So, while British unions were generally not as politically radical as the International Workingmen’s Association, or its Continental members, they nevertheless became the strongest backers of the organization. This First International, the IWA, encouraged labor agitation across Europe. Led chiefly by Karl Marx, they intended it to prepare the workers of the world for a Proletarian revolution.
But on a more day-to-day basis, the IWA primarily organized mutual aid for its member unions. So, a union from one country (usually Britain) would make a loan to a union in France or Switzerland or somewhere so they could print pamphlets or go out on strike or provide for the widows of workers arrested or killed by police. These loans were seldom repaid, and the unions making the loans typically understood they wouldn’t be repaid, but believed such gestures were important for the cause of labor generally.
And, for a while anyway, it seemed to work. Strikes, slowdowns, and other labor action spread like wildfire in Europe and the Americas. Workers fought for greater compensation, recognition of their unions, and political rights, including universal male suffrage. In many cases, they actually won.
Yet the cause of international solidarity was also difficult to keep up. Language barriers, cultural differences, and ideological disagreements often got in the way. By 1872, divisions in the IWA led to a great split, and new, diverse international labor organizations sought to fill the vacuum, often with competing visions for the future.
All the while, workers throughout the world were fighting increasingly bitter, bloody battles against their capitalist bosses and the governments protecting them. Mass walkouts left mills and other factories empty. Sometimes entire cities shut down. Blood was spilled. Newspapers expressed outrage. Protesters were shot. Bombs were thrown. And big questions were raised about the consequences of industrialization and the challenges it posed to the very fabric of society.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 66: The Revolt of Labor
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Okay, I have some administrative notes before I begin.
First of all, that Samuel Gompers quote from the beginning was sent to me by longtime listener and supporter Ross Templeton, so I want to give him a very special shout out for that. Thank you, Ross!
Second, listener Rich Cairn caught a mistake I made last time – and this one is pretty embarrassing. When talking about the IWW I referred to them as the International Workers of the World. They are, in fact, the Industrial Workers of the World. Sorry about that. Not sure how I messed that up, to be honest.
Third, as a special holiday gift to you, I am going to release one more bonus episode before the end of the year! I will be interviewing Ethan Johnson, who has been doing some great research into a fascinating topic from the Technological Revolution: Coin-operated machines! So come back in a couple weeks to learn more about them and the impact they have had on our world.
Finally, I want to thank everyone who continues to support this podcast financially. Special shout outs to Jeppe Burchhardt and new patron David Roberson, as well as Andrej Andrejkovic, John Bartlett, Adam Bibby, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brooking, Harriet Buchanan, Tara Carlson, “Dancer in the Dark”, Michael Hausknecht, Madeleine Hill, Eric Hogensen, Alonso Ibanez, Naomi Kanakia, Kyle Laskowski, Ian Le Quesne, Brian Long, Andrew C. Madigan, Martin Mann, Duncan McHale, John Newton, Brad Rosse, Joshua Shanley, Kristian Sibast, Jonathan Smith, Tanner, Ross Templeton, and Seth Wiener. Thank you!
Now, let’s get on with the show.
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Part 1: The Commune
The Second Industrial Revolution was an era marked by a deepening division between capital and labor. Strikes and lockouts seemed to break out everywhere and all the time. By the time it was over, socialist and labor parties had sprung up across the world.
The tone of this period was set in the Spring of 1871, with an insurrection in France.
Back in Chapter 53, we talked about the rise of Germany in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. The establishment of the new German Empire had coincided with the fall of the Second French Empire. On September 1, 1870, Emperor Napoleon III was captured by the Germans, leaving the French government in disarray. Days later, more than 20,000 citizens marched through Paris and overran the National Assembly. They then went to the Hôtel de Ville – the Paris City Hall – where they declared the formation of the Third French Republic.
Now, during the Second Empire, the population of Paris had doubled to about 2 million people, driven by the economic forces of industrialization, the city’s geographic expansion into the outer suburbs, and Barron Haussmann’s massive renovations of the city. (Shout out Chapter 51!) And with the central slums cleared as part of that renovation, the working classes of the city were removed to neighborhoods of concentrated poverty lying on the periphery of Paris.
Even as late as 1870, industry in Paris was still pretty decentralized. 60% of manufacturers in the city employed fewer than five workers. So, even though they were doing increasingly specialized drudge work – rather than the artisanal craftsmanship of old – they did not really have the means to mobilize unions in large shops on any notable scale. As a result, class struggle in Paris didn’t take the form of workers against bosses like it did in Britain, for example. It was more political in nature than that.
In these working-class communities, different strains of radicalism emerged. The largest were what we call the neo-Jacobins – students of the French Revolution still seeking that order of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity by any means possible.
Then there were the followers of the socialist revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui, who has come up a few times before. These Blanquists believed that a small group – like themselves – should be the vanguard of a new revolution. And among the results of this revolution would be greater redistribution of the new wealth generated in the industrial age.
And finally, there were the followers of our old friend – the late Father of Anarchism himself – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Like many of the anarchists we discussed last time, the Proudhonists in Paris wanted to decentralize France by ignoring the power of the state and developing autonomous communes instead. These communes would be organized loosely and voluntarily, with decision-making power democratized and largely confined to co-operative worksites.
Still, the vast majority of Parisians were not so radical. But then came the war.
After the fall of the empire, representatives of the Third Republic tried to negotiate with the Germans, but they were rebuffed. The Prussian Prime Minister – our old friend, Otto von Bismarck – insisted that France cede the territory of Alsace-Lorraine, home to such cities as Metz and Strassburg. Insulted by this attack on their honor, the French refused. So, the Germans marched on the French capital.
With the enemy on the way, those Parisians who could afford to fled their city, leaving behind a poorer, more radical population. And it was that radical population that would endure the brutal winter of 1870 to 1871 together.
The Siege of Paris was traumatizing. Food and supplies were cut off. By the end of it, not only had people resorted to eating rats, they commonly complained that it was only the wealthier sorts who could still afford rat meat. In all, some 50,000 citizens died in the siege. News from the outside was cut off as well, as the Germans severed the telegraph cables that fed the city’s newspapers. This made the Parisians all the more anxious, as they had come to expect news updates as a regular fact of life in this age of mass newspaper distribution.
Cut off from the rest of France, the Parisians began organizing for their needs themselves. Radicals – especially Proudhonists – had already started forming self-governing communities in their neighborhoods. These “vigilance committees”, elected by neighborhood assemblies, would serve the local needs of the population – providing health clinics, soup kitchens, and more – and they began sending delegates to a central vigilance committee for Paris. By the end of September 1870, this committee was plastering red posters, calling for the formation of a self-governing commune.
At the same time, new political clubs – the “red clubs” – started springing up. And with the theaters closed and no news to read, these clubs became some of the only outlets for Parisians to keep their minds stimulated during the siege.
What’s more, this emergency forced the National Guard to become more egalitarian. While it had long been a bourgeois militia used to keep the masses in order, working class members were now allowed to join. Sensing an opportunity to seize power through these armed units, Blanquists and Proudhonists started joining in greater numbers.
Now, when Metz fell to the Germans, they allowed news of it into Paris to heighten the sense of hopelessness. Blanqui and others decided this was the opportunity for a revolution, to throw out the new, moderate, republican regime. But their planned insurrection failed. By the end of the siege, though, as the Germans started shelling Paris, there was renewed hope for revolution. The shells caused so few casualties that it inspired a feeling of empowerment in the city, and there were renewed calls for creating a commune.
Eventually, the Third Republic was forced to surrender to the Germans. The terms were terrible. France would not only cede Alsace-Lorraine, they were also forced to pay a huge indemnity – something like 23% of the country’s GDP – which the Germans would wait for while camped outside Paris. There was a huge sense within the city that this emergency republican government had sold them out to an enemy who had made their lives Hell.
Finally, in February 1871, an election was held. Yet it was so poorly publicized, many French citizens weren’t aware it was happening. As a result of the limited vote, the newly elected government was remarkably conservative. Almost two-thirds of them were actually monarchists. Our old friend, the Orleanist Adolphe Thiers, became Prime Minister. A liberal revolutionary back in Chapter 40, Thiers was now viewed more like a reactionary conservative, even though his views had changed very little over the years. It was France that had changed so much over those four decades.
In the aftermath of the election, tensions only deepened in Paris. The radicals hated the terms of the armistice, and they noted how the food aid coming into the city was being distributed first and foremost to the wealthier neighborhoods.
Then, on February 15th, National Guard battalions in the city sent delegates to a new committee which declared itself the Federation of the National Guard, standing for freedom, republicanism, and social equality. A week later, 7,200 guards met in a large outdoor meeting, where they decided they would be electing their officers from now on. What’s more, officers could be recalled. Decisions would now be made from the bottom up. And the leaders they elected were – no surprise – radical socialists. This, along with the more Proudhonist-led vigilance committees, would form the political and military infrastructure of the Paris Commune.
Of course, the new government was wary of Parisian radicalism, so they decided to make Versailles the capital of France again, at least for the time being. They also restored debt collection – which had been paused during the crisis of the previous winter – and decided to stop paying the National Guard their salaries.
Meanwhile, the official government in Paris – the local authority backed by the Versailles regime – had no real power. Everyone was ignoring them. Everything by this point was being operated by the bottom-up leadership of the National Guard and vigilance committees.
The crisis finally came to a head on March 17th, when the national government decided to seize the cannons of Paris. Now, the cannons had always been in the control of the National Guard. The National Guard had raised the money to pay for the cannons, and they were a source of pride for that militia. But Thiers did not trust them in the hands of these radicals – he believed the state needed to monopolize the use of force in order to legitimize its power. Paris wasn’t having it. So, the army was sent in.
But things did not go quite so smoothly on March 18th. That morning, the army secured the Paris cannons, but they forgot to bring the horses necessary to cart them out of the city. By the time everyone woke up and realized the cannons were being taken, panic broke out. Angry Parisians confronted the soldiers, many of whom subsequently mutinied. The commander who was trying to take the cannons was arrested by a mob. They transferred him to the local vigilance committee, which now claimed legal jurisdiction of the neighborhood. At this point, the state officials in the city fled. Military officers were swiftly “tried” and executed by the mob. And back at the Hôtel de Ville, the National Guard took control and lowered the French Tricolor flying above the building. Replacing it, they hoisted the red flag of socialism.
At this point, the National Guard’s central committee essentially became the Paris government. And although the Blanquist faction of the committee argued they should march on Versailles and overthrow the Third Republic, the majority – including the Proudhonists – decided they should avoid further provocation. Instead, they argued, they should turn to a peaceful, autonomous administration of Paris, led by a democratically elected government. This Paris Commune would be a model for the other towns and cities of France and, indeed, Europe. Replacing the power of the state would be a reign of freedom.
On March 26th, an election was held for the Commune Council. Heeding warnings from Versailles that the election was illegal, moderate Parisians sat it out, allowing the most radical citizens to choose their government. Roughly half the councilors were “independent revolutionaries” – essentially neo-Jacobins. A few were Blanquists. About one in five were Proudhonists, and the rest were more moderate republicans.
Though the radicals held a clear majority, disagreements broke out almost immediately between the anarchists and the other revolutionaries over the nature of the Commune. The former sought to make it the type of commune Bakunin had envisioned in our last episode – a free environment for voluntary self-government, with basically no rules. The Blanquists basically wanted to make it a dictatorship of the Proletariat – or a dictatorship for the Proletariat, at any rate. And the neo-Jacobins basically wanted to do what the original Jacobins had done in the 1790s: violently spread a more democratic order across the region.
The structure of the Commune would be very decentralized. All decisions were to be made mostly on a local level and by committee. And I think you can guess how inefficient and ineffective that turned out to be, especially with the French army preparing for a full-scale invasion.
But the Commune did manage to adopt some very far-left policies in its time. It absolved Parisians of the debts they had built up during the Siege. Pawn brokers were told to return the work tools that had been pawned.
Pay was restored for the National Guard and provisions were made for the widows of the war dead.
Workers were empowered to take control of any business in the city where the employer had fled. New regulations prevented employers from docking pay or work for various workplace infractions.
A total separation of Church and State was established, including the secularization of schools, seizure of certain church property, and surveillance and arrests of many priests and nuns suspected of counter-revolutionary sympathies.
Capital punishment was abolished – albeit, this principle was abandoned as the experiment reached its bloody conclusion in May, and among those who would be executed was the Archbishop of Paris.
And most fun of all, they restored the ridiculous French republican calendar. (Shout out Chapter 21!)
But the anarchist ideals of voluntary self-organization, with all the anti-police, anti-hierarchical views it entailed, were greatly tested. The Neo-Jacobins and Blanquists were very suspicious of counter-revolution, and so they installed officers who used police tactics similar to those of previous regimes.
And efforts toward conscription and professionalization of the National Guard – in which soldiers would be forced to actually, you know, follow orders – were hated by the more anarchist-minded Communards. To these ends, some Neo-Jacobins and Blanquists wanted to stop the elections and recalls of officers, as well as the freedom for guards to come and go from service as they pleased. Thus, morale in the ranks plummeted. While the National Guard would prove skilled at maintaining positions within Paris come the invasion, they were never able to launch any successful counter-attacks as the Versailles forces closed in. And once they did close in, few guards actually showed up to man the barricades.
One of the more surprising decisions made was to cooperate with the Bank of France. This central bank held huge reserves in Paris that the Commune could have seized for the war effort. But, fearing such a move would lead to a collapse of the franc, they instead decided to take out loans from the Bank – loans they fully intended to repay.
Finally, as the prospect of invasion drew nearer, the Blanquists and Neo-Jacobins pushed through the consolidation of the commune’s governance into a new Committee of Public Safety – a five-man dictatorship.
But ultimately, there was little hope they could prevail. On May 21st, the French army invaded the former capital. The next seven days would go down in history as The Bloody Week.
Because governance of Paris had become so decentralized under the Commune, there was little communication between neighborhoods for collective self-defense. Once the army snuck into the city through an undefended part of the gates, they were able to fan out and swiftly take control, committing summary executions of communards as they went.
Realizing the army was closing in, and the dreams of autonomy now impossible to maintain, the Commune sought symbolic victories instead. They set fire to buildings they viewed as representing oppression, including the Tuileries Palace and the Hôtel de Ville. Arson would engulf much of the city.
By the time the Bloody Week was over, thousands of Parisians (perhaps tens of thousands) were dead – most of them being communards. Some 43,000 who weren’t executed were transported to French penal colonies like New Caledonia in the South Pacific, although most of these convicts would return to France once amnesty was granted in 1879.
The Paris Commune had a profound impact on the remainder of the 19th Century. In countries like the US and UK, it was described in the newspapers as “despotism” and “The Reign of Anarchy and Murder.” Upper- and middle-class readers expressed outrage at the violence perpetrated by the Parisians and the disorder they sowed. Often labeling the communards as “communists”, it was, for many people, an introduction to the word “Communism”. In the decades to come, the “communist” label would be used by capitalists, newspaper publishers, politicians, police, and others to invoke the fear of disorder, and they would hurl it at striking workers to justify the violent suppression of their activities.
The events in Paris also greatly divided the international socialist and labor movements. While more radical associations had cheered on their Parisian brothers and sisters, the more moderate trade unions feared the Commune had done great damage to the Labor brand. Even among the radicals, it had exposed the great divergence of views between the Marxist and anarchist branches of socialism. This would lead to the famous split between the Red and the Black at the Hague Congress of the IWA in September 1872, as the two camps blamed each other’s ideas for the Commune’s ultimate failure. When the Congress adopted Marx’s declaration that the Proletariat needed to take control of the state in order to have a successful revolution, Bakunin and other anarchists protested, leading to their expulsion. The anarchists would create their own International to compete with the IWA, although it would not last long. The IWA too was defunct by 1876.
But the Commune would live on in the memory of the revolutionary left for decades to come. And though they would have to scrutinize what had gone wrong, they would forever remember its goals as their goals for establishing Proletarian rule.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, workers and radicals began organizing for some of the bloodiest years in American labor history.
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Part 2: Great Upheavals
On July 17, 1877, engineers from the B&O Railroad disconnected the locomotives from the train cars in the yard at Martinsburg, West Virginia. They had not received their pay from the previous month yet and, to make matters worse, management had announced a 10% wage reduction. The striking workers explained to their bosses that the trains would not move until they were paid and the proposed cut was rescinded.
It took only a day for violence to break out. On July 18th, a train passed through, escorted by the state’s National Guard. Gunfire broke out between the militia and workers. Before the week was over, a crowd in Baltimore tried to block the local armory in support of the protesters. The Maryland National Guard shot into the crowd, killing 11 people and injuring another 40 – most of whom were actually bystanders, including a 14-year-old newsboy.
That summer, strikes broke out in railroad hubs across the country. It became known as the Great Upheaval.
As I mentioned back in Chapter 63, the Panic of 1873 had left the railroads reeling. The companies had built too fast, overextending their credit. And as liquidity froze up, these railroads struggled to raise the capital needed for further expansion.
At the same time, they were struggling to bring in the revenues they needed to avoid collapse as deflation forced down prices. And as I mentioned in Chapter 62, employers frequently decided the best way to shore up finances in this environment was to cut wages. Afterall, with deflation came greater purchasing power, meaning the workers were still seeing their real incomes rise even as their take-home wages fell.
But by 1877, the railroads were seeing their situations improve. And in this age of growing income inequality, workers were outraged they were still being targeted.
By July 19th, the strike reached Pittsburg, where workers struck against the Pennsylvania Railway – led by our old friend, Thomas Alexander Scott. (Remember? He was Andrew Carnegie’s old boss and mentor.) The company had announced changes that would reduce the number of workers needed per train, significantly increasing the likelihood of accidents. After fights broke out between workers and their managers, Scott called upon his political contacts everywhere – from local governments all the way up to the White House. And he convinced the Governor of Pennsylvania to send in the National Guard.
Two days later, striking workers clashed with the Guard’s 1st Division. Local businessmen and their families watched the battle from a hill above, hoping to see the strike routed. With rocks being thrown toward the militia by the protesters, the guards opened fire and charged with bayonets, killing 20 and wounding another 29. But the strikers outnumbered the guards about 25-to-1, and they chased the 1st Division into a railroad roundhouse. From there they set fire to it, forcing the guards into a chaotic retreat. Machine guns fired down city streets. By that evening, mob rule consumed Pittsburg. More than a hundred locomotives and 1,200 train cars were destroyed, as well as nearly 40 buildings owned by the railroad company.
Pittsburg was the site of the most notorious violence from the Great Railroad Strike, but it wasn’t alone. Railway workers walked off the job in New York City, Chicago, and St. Louis. Rioting consumed Philadelphia. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, it morphed into a general strike, which saw gun battles between workers and private militiamen.
In San Francsico, the Workingmen’s Party organized a rally of 8,000 workers in support of the railroad strike back east. Speakers denounced the greed of the railroads, emphasizing the fact that these companies were helping bring thousands of Chinese workers into the state, depressing wages for white workers. That evening, as the crowd marched through the streets, a Chinese man happened to pass by. He was jumped and beaten by a few of the workers, who then shouted “On to Chinatown!” A riot lasted for four days, targeting Chinese workers, small businesses, and even a local Methodist church serving the Chinese community.
If differences in language and culture made the project of international solidarity difficult, the heterogenous composition of the American working class made solidarity next to impossible. With so many immigrant groups coming in, local unions often coalesced not just on the basis of profession, but also around distinct ethnic and religious communities. Major industrial cities had large populations of German workers, British workers, Irish workers, and increasingly of Polish workers, Czech workers, Italian workers, and Jewish workers. They seldom trusted each other. But the prejudices they held for one another paled in comparison to their racism toward Chinese and Black workers.
Still, efforts were made to bridge differences and form a united front for the American labor movement.
Back in 1866, a National Labor Union was formed to unite skilled and unskilled laborers, farmers, and their allies for political action. In particular, the NLU lobbied for an 8-Hour Workday law. However, it collapsed in 1873, after launching a political party that failed spectacularly at the polls the year before.
Meanwhile, a more radical and secretive organization was growing across several eastern cities. First established in 1869 by nine Philadelphian tailors, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor had become a national movement by the time of the Great Railroad Strike. In the wake of that upheaval came a surge in membership and industrial action. By the mid-1880s, the Knights of Labor had hundreds of thousands of members – possibly over a million – across the United States, with branches forming in Canada and Australia as well.
With a rather decentralized structure, the Knights were able to appeal to many different groups – skilled and unskilled workers, Catholics and Protestants, men and women, whites and Blacks. The only groups they explicitly excluded were bankers, land speculators, lawyers, liquor dealers, and gamblers – all of whom they viewed as parasitic. But they also effectively excluded Chinese Americans and strongly supported the Chinese Exclusion Act.
In fact, while immigrants made up a great number of the Knights of Labor, the organization sought to curtail the immigration boom which they saw as driving down wages. To this end, they sought to support European labor organizing. With the IWA swept into the dustbin of history, the Knights sought to fill the void, establishing branches across the world to rebuild international solidarity. The project never did get very far, but they did send funds across the Atlantic to support strikes and the formation of new unions.
Like the NLU, the K of L pushed for an 8-Hour Workday law. They also advocated for the abolition of child labor, the introduction of a progressive income tax, cooperatives, and the ideas of our friend from last time, Henry George. Unlike the NLU, the Knights were heavily involved in strikes across the country.
Among them was the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886. It was part of a second Great Upheaval, as hundreds of thousands of workers across the country joined the K o f L. When one of the Knights in Texas was fired for attending a union meeting, his fellow workers walked off the job. From Texas, the strike spread to Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri. For over a month, tens of thousands of workers shut down Jay Gould’s Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific railroads.
Then the strike crossed the Mississippi into East St. Louis, Illinois, where workers disabled the trains at the terminus. Eager sheriff’s deputies fired into the picket line, killing seven strikers and wounding several others. The governor declared martial law in the city. When word of the massacre reached Chicago, more than 1,300 switchmen left their posts.
As I have mentioned before, Chicago had become – by this point – a hotbed of radical labor agitation. In addition to the leftist Knights, the city had thousands of workers mobilized by the more moderate Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, as well as the anarchist-led Central Labor Union. Despite their ideological differences, all three organizations were already marshaling for a general strike to be held on Saturday, May 1st that year – what they dubbed their “Emancipation Day.”
After a one-day strike, the laborers would return to work on Monday with demands. The one demand they all had was for an eight-hour workday. And while the Federation – representing mostly skilled workers – would settle for reduced wages in exchange for the eight-hour day, the other unions would demand an eight-hour day at ten-hours pay. This encouraged the non-skilled workers to join the cause.
On May Day, at least 30,000 workers shut down scores of lumber yards, garment factories, rail lines, sheet metal shops, slaughterhouses, bakeries, construction sites, and other workplaces across the city. By Monday, many more were joining their ranks, which swelled to an estimated 340,000. But employers held the line, organizing their trade associations to resist the strikers’ demands, pressuring each other not to give in. It was part of a movement that our old friend, the historian Sven Beckert, has called “the consolidation of the American bourgeoisie.”
By the end of Monday, the unions saw two major setbacks.
One was that the Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, Terence Powderly (who generally disliked strikes as opposed to legislative advocacy), unilaterally ended the Great Southwest Railroad Strike, believing it was doomed to fail.
The other took place at the gates of the McCormick Reaper Works. Now led by Cyrus’ son, Cyrus Jr., the company was fed up after years of union pressure and locked out its union workers. When the bell rang out at the conclusion of the workday, picketers rushed to confront the scabs leaving the factory. At that point, some 200 police officers charged the crowd, clubbing and shooting the union workers – some in the back as they fled.
Among the witnesses was the radical labor leader and newspaper editor August Spies, who had been speaking at a rally there. Infuriated, he returned to the office of his newspaper, the German-language Arbeiter-Zeitung, where he quickly published a leaflet reading:
“REVENGE! Workingmen, to Arms!!! Your masters have sent out their bloodhounds – the police – they killed six of your brothers at McCormick’s this afternoon… If you are men, if you are the sons of grand sires who have shed their blood to free you, then you will rise in your might, Hercules, and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you. To arms, we call you. To arms!”
As hundreds of this “Revenge circular” were distributed throughout Chicago, a rally was announced for the following evening in the Haymarket Square. Meanwhile, a pair of young anarchist carpenters – Louis Lingg and William Seliger – began making 30 to 40 bombs at Seliger’s house. Enamored by the recent invention of dynamite (Shout out Chapter 57!), many anarchists saw it as a powerful and covert way to respond to acts of police brutality during labor demonstrations.
On the evening of May 4th, a small crowd of about 500 workers gathered at the Haymarket to hear Spies speak. He was followed by the prominent anarchist Albert Parsons – who I am definitely going to talk about in the footnotes today, for all you Patreon supporters – and a Methodist pastor / anarchist named Samuel Fielden. Planted throughout the crowd were undercover detectives, who reported back to the chief inspector Fielden’s incendiary remarks to “Keep your eye on the law. Throttle it. Kill it. Stop it. Do everything you can to wound it – to impede its progress.”
At about 10:20pm, a column of uniformed police officers made their way through the crowd to break it up. Accounts vary dramatically about what precisely all happened next. But one thing is for certain: Someone threw a bomb. After it exploded, police fired shots all around them, hitting several workers and each other, and shots may have been fired back by some of the workers too. In all, four workers and six officers died, while another 70-some workers and 60 officers were injured.
The Haymarket Massacre, as its often remembered, sent shockwaves across the world. Following a trial featuring very poor evidence against them, seven anarchists – including Spies, Parsons, and Fielden, as well as Lingg – were sentenced to death, while an eighth (who wasn’t even there) received a 15-year imprisonment. (I will note that two of the convicts, including Fielden, later had their sentences commuted.)
The Knights of Labor declined significantly in membership, as its popularity disintegrated in the wake of the bombing. The Federation, meanwhile, decided to rebrand itself as the American Federation of Labor. And as the Knights gradually drifted into irrelevance, the more moderate AFL – led by the rising cigarmaker Samuel Gompers – would grow to become the nation’s pre-eminent labor conglomeration.
In Europe, news of the tragedy and subsequent trial led socialists to embrace Chicago’s “Emancipation Day” – May 1st – as a day of remembrance. As a result, most countries around the world today celebrate Labor Day on May Day. But in the United States and Canada, it is celebrated around the date that marked the end of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. It was in early September 1877 when President Rutherford B. Hayes sent troops throughout the country to put down the strike by force.
But while the Haymarket Massacre marked a major moment in American labor history, it would not mark the end of the bloodshed.
In 1892, Andrew Carnegie consolidated his growing steel empire into a new corporation: Carnegie Steel. Leading its operations was a coke manufacturer Carnegie brought in named Henry Clay Frick. Carnegie had long voiced approval for trades unions, and our old friend – Carnegie’s manager, Captain Jones – had established an eight-hour workday for the steelworkers. But Carnegie was also shrewd about keeping labor costs down, insisting to Frick that they needed to have the lowest wages in the industry to keep profits accumulating.
At that time, the only unionized steel works in the company was the Homestead mill in Pittsburg. And as the union’s contract was set to expire that July, Carnegie left on a vacation to Scotland, leaving Frick to deal with the bargaining process. Although he urged Frick not to use scabs in the event of a strike, he also grew frustrated with reports of the slow negotiations and told Frick to call them off.
Thus, on July 1st, as the contract expired, the union took control of the Homestead plant and shut it down. The next day, Frick fired all 3,800 workers, locked them out, built a huge barbed-wired fence around the factory, and called up a force of 300 Pinkerton agents from Philadelphia to help secure it.
Formed in 1850 by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency offered private security and espionage services to governments and businesses alike. During the Gilded Age, it became a popular contractor for employers to infiltrate unions and break strikes – including the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the upheaval in Chicago in 1886.
The Pinkertons who sent to Homestead – most of whom were new, untrained recruits – arrived on July 6th. Believing the agents were there to protect scabs, thousands of striking workers rushed the plant. Over the next 12 hours, an intense gun battle raged. Finally, the Pinkertons surrendered. Several were badly beaten by the crowd – which included the workers’ wives – and others were sent on barges to the local jail before the mob set fire to them. In all, at least 10 people died that day.
At this point, Frick had the governor send in 8,500 members of the National Guard. They arrived on July 12th. Within three days, the guards had taken control of the plant, which was subsequently stocked with non-union workers.
In an attempt to save face with progressives, Carnegie shifted the blame for the catastrophe entirely on Frick’s shoulders – a position he would maintain his entire life, even in his posthumously-published autobiography. Frick, for his part, was shot and stabbed by an anarchist later that month, though he would survive and go on to have a very prosperous career. And the news of this assassination attempt made the strike unpopular enough that it subsequently collapsed. Thus, the American steel industry would not be successfully unionized until the 1930s.
Carnegie was not the last of our old friends to see a deadly strike break out at his factory. Another was George Pullman.
As the Pullman Palace Car Company expanded in the 1870s, it needed a newer, larger factory. Thus, Pullman purchased 4,000 acres of land outside Chicago to construct both a manufacturing plant and a model village for the employees – much like Sir Titus Salt had done back in Bradford, England. (Shout out Chapter 51 again!)
By 1883, 8,000 people were living and working in Pullman, Illinois. The arrangement allowed Pullman to see the wages he paid to his workers returned to him in the form of rent, as well as in the form of profits from the local company stores. Still, Pullman viewed this as benevolent capitalism. He was looking out for his employees’ welfare. And, indeed, the red-brick homes they rented were spacious and modern, with indoor plumbing.
Yet, some of the employees saw the village as a “gilded cage”. They did not enjoy the personal freedoms of other workers. Complaining about rents or wages could get you fired, as there was little opportunity to leave. Still, Pullman was not free from strikes – indeed, it was one of the major employers hit by the tumult of 1886 in Greater Chicago.
Then came the Panic of 1893. The economic downturn was severe and demand for train rides on Pullman cars plummeted. The company was losing money and decided to cut the already low wages it paid by an average of 25%. And yet, rents – which were automatically deducted from paychecks – and prices at the company store remained the same. The squeeze workers felt left many of their families facing literal starvation – even as the employees were forced to work 16 hours per day.
That May, a delegation of employees asked to meet with Mr. Pullman to voice their concerns. Not only did the boss refuse to meet them, he had them fired. And so, the workforce – about a third of which was represented by the American Railway Union (the ARU) – decided to strike.
With the production of new cars at a standstill, the Pullman company was able to keep costs down while still bringing in revenue from the cars already on railroads it had contracts with across the country. So, in order for the strike to be successful, the workers needed to do more than walk off the job. They needed to encourage their brothers in the ARU to join them.
The next month, the ARU voted to start a boycott. Switchmen they represented would refuse to work with trains pulling Pullman cars. At its peak, about a quarter million workers across dozens of railroads were on strike in solidarity with their manufacturing brothers in Chicago. It created a massive bottleneck to internal trade and commerce within the United States, wreaking havoc on an already weakened economy.
Nobody was more satisfied with the success of the strike so far than the ARU’s president, Eugene Victor Debs.
Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855, Eugene V. Debs was the son of a prosperous textile manufacturer. But he dropped out of school at age 14 and started working on the railroads and joined a union. He later got a job as a grocer and started taking business classes. In 1879, he was elected city clerk in Terre Haute, and five years later was elected to the Indiana State Assembly. All the while, he continued working for his union and editing their magazine. In 1893, he helped organize a nationwide union for railroad workers, the ARU, and led a successful strike against the Great Northern Railway.
The Pullman strike would prove to be a major turning point in Debs’ life.
Despite his warnings to keep the strike peaceful, violent clashes between workers and local police broke out repeatedly. After a U.S. mail car was set on fire, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to railroad hubs across the country, ostensibly to maintain peace. At first, Debs welcomed the intervention. But he soon discovered that the soldiers had really come with another mission: To break the strike. The Justice Department, meanwhile, used the new Sherman Antitrust Act to secure an injunction to end it – ordering union leaders to stop “compelling or inducing” workers “to refuse or fail to perform any of their duties.” As the National Guard clashed with workers, Debs tried settling with Pullman and the railroads, asking simply for union workers to be rehired. But with the government squarely behind them, many of the companies – including Pullman’s – refused.
The outcome was a disaster for Debs. Not only had some 70 people died in the violence, his workers had lost nearly $1 million in wages, most of the corporations were de-unionized, and Debs himself was tried and convicted of violating the injunction against the strike. It would be during his imprisonment that he started reading socialist literature, radicalizing him for his political career in the 20th Century. He would go on to help found the Socialist Party of America and a radical alternative to the AFL: The IWW.
The American labor movement would continue into the Progressive Era, with radical unionism peaking toward the end of the Second Industrial Revolution. But for now, let’s turn our attention to union efforts back in Europe.
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Part 3: Internationalism Resurrected
The historian Peter Stearns explains it this way:
“The surge of working-class protest reflected new capabilities. Most Western governments had introduced democracy by the 1880s and reduced the legal limitations on strikes and unions. These changes, plus growing experience in industrial life, made more protest feasible. Workers were not necessarily angrier than they had been during the industrial revolution proper – indeed, they may now have accepted more aspects of industrial life – but at last they could do something about their discontent, and they had plenty of discontent left.”
Much of the discontent expressed by workers across the Western world was about their feelings of emasculation under capitalism. Unlike the skilled craftsmen who operated independently within the guild system of old, late 19th Century workers were both dependent on their employers for their livelihoods and subject to their employer’s rules. In this sense, it was not free labor – it was wage slavery, and it was unacceptably dehumanizing. When addressing their fellow workers, many activists promoted unions as a way to restore their “manliness.”
Back in Chapter 22, I mentioned how the German steel tycoon, Alfred Krupp, had built a comprehensive welfare arrangement for his workforce. He provided for his employees’ housing, health care, and funerals, as well as education for their children. It was a model that other major industrialists introduced elsewhere in Europe and the United States – including George Pullman in his factory town.
But, as it turned out, such examples of employer paternalism often conflicted with the employees’ self-esteem. Many strikes were waged – at least in part – to get workers’ control of their own sickness and burial funds, their own housing, and greater self-determination within their communities.
Among them were a pair of strikes at Le Creusot in Burgundy. Another guy I mentioned back in Chapter 22 was Eugène Schneider, who ran the giant iron works there. By 1870, he had provided a contingency fund to workers for over thirty years. Financed by a 2.5% deduction from their pay, the fund covered their medical needs, pensions, and schooling for their children.
Increasingly, unions sought to control these kinds of funds, and such an arrangement was proposed at Le Creusot. Schneider, believing his workforce was grateful to him for the fund’s existence, decided to hold a vote on the matter. But he was aghast when the majority voted for worker control. The company refused to accept the results, fearing the unions would redirect the funds toward strikes. That January, workers tried to press the issue of controlling the fund and struck for five days. The army was called in to suppress it and the ringleaders were arrested.
But by March, another contingent of workers decided to strike. After another three weeks, this one was also put down, but not before considerable damage was done to Schneider’s reputation. As one radical newspaper put it, it was “a question of dignity.” Unions from across France, as well as Belgium and Switzerland, provided support to the workers, encouraging them to “Persevere in your demand to manage you own savings, which this millionaire refuses to return to you.”
From 1870 through the end of the century, union drives and strikes kept increasing in number, especially as unskilled workers joined the movement. Among them were the successful Matchgirls’ Strike of 1888 and Docks Strike of 1889, both in London. The latter saw an incredible 100,000 laborers shut down the city’s shipping industry.
After the fall of the IWA, national trade union centers were formed to help sustain the movement. I already mentioned the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor in the U.S. In the U.K. the Trades Union Congress (TUC) had already formed in 1868. It was followed by the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada in 1886, the General Union of Workers (UGT) in Spain in 1888, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) in France in 1895, and the Trade Union Confederations (LOs) in Scandinavia in 1898, among others.
And, like in the United States, European employers began organizing their own associations in response. They developed their own strategies for managing labor unrest, including strike insurance, which served as a sort of capitalist form of mutual aid. Another was so-called “yellow unions”, which were sponsored by employers to give the more loyal employees a voice while disenfranchising the troublemakers.
Strikes and other labor demonstrations primarily focused on achieving better pay and working conditions, while occasionally there were demands for control of benefits funds and all other sorts of issues. But increasingly, such actions took on broader political objectives as well.
In 1890, over 75,000 men and women took to the streets in Brussels, demanding universal suffrage. It set off a chain of events within Belgium’s socialist movement. Over the next three years, facing mounting pressure from striking workers, Parliament considered the issue of extending the franchise. Like most constitutional monarchies of the time, Belgium limited the vote to certain property owners. The Proletariat wanted a one-person, one-vote system for all.
When Parliament decided not to expand its democracy, the Belgian Workers’ Party announced a general strike. Beginning in April 1893, thousands took to the streets in Brussels, Ghent, and other towns and cities. Walloon miners cut telephone and telegraph lines, built barricades, and threw rocks at police. Socialist leaders were hunted by bayonet-wielding soldiers and arrested.
Finally, socialist leaders worked out a compromise with Parliament. The vote would be extended to all. However, certain privileged voters – like property owners – would get extra votes. The activists were not happy about it, but it allowed them a foot in the door. The next year, 28 socialists were elected to Parliament. From there, they would work over the years to both advance the interests of labor and better democratize Belgium.
Though the Belgian Workers’ Party was Marxist, they didn’t see themselves as part of the orthodox or revisionist branches that we discussed last time. Rather, they were pragmatists. By mobilizing workers for a general strike, they demonstrated the power of their movement. Behind it was an implicit threat of violent revolution. As socialist leader Emile Vandervelde put it during the General Strike of 1893, if Parliament “decrees political equality, it will be the army of labor that joyfully re-enters their factories. If they refuse us, we will become the army of the Revolution.” At the same time, these socialists were able to convince the radical workers that this was the revolution – a peaceful, democratic revolution, which would ultimately advance their interests.
Indeed, the Belgians held two more general strikes for one-person, one-vote. The second, in 1902, was painfully disorganized and unsuccessful. But the third, in 1913, was incredibly well planned. As a result of its success, so-called “plural suffrage” was abolished following the First World War.
This gradual, passive, democratic revolution proved far more successful for achieving socialist ends than did the kind of violent revolutions predicted by Marx – at least in our period of focus, anyway. Anarchists attempted insurrections in Spain and Italy during the 1870s that were summarily put down. In 1890, the so-called “Revolution of the Park” in Buenos Aries – launched to overthrow the oligarchical Argentine government and bring universal suffrage – was squashed in just three bloody days. And an unsuccessful revolt of technophobic Korean peasants in the 1890s led to tens of thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands – of deaths, as well as the start of the First Sino-Japanese War.
But in 1889, socialists of both the revolutionary and reformist persuasions came together in Paris on the 100th Anniversary of Bastille Day. After ironing out their considerable disagreements, they managed to relaunch the cause of worker internationalism. Although it excluded the anarchists, this Second International reaffirmed the struggle against capitalism, established May Day as International Workers’ Day, and adopted an anthem that remains a favorite tune among leftists to this day.
Arise, wretched of the earth
Arise, prisoners of hunger
Reason thunders in its volcano
This is the eruption of the end
Of the past let us wipe the slate clean
Slave masses, arise, arise
The world is about to change its foundation
We are nothing, let us be everythingThis is the final struggle
Let us gather together, and tomorrow
The International
Will be the human race
With French lyrics originally composed during the downfall of the Paris Commune, versions of “L’Internationale” were soon made for seemingly every language.
And for the remainder of the Second Industrial Revolution, the Second International organized unions and socialist parties around the globe to advance the cause of working peoples everywhere. Almost nowhere was the movement more successful than in Germany, where rapid industrialization was changing the course of European history – next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
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Don’t forget to come back on December 18th for a bonus episode about the history of coin-operated machines! Get alerts about the Industrial Revolutions by signing up for the email newsletter at www.IndustrialRevolutionsPod.com. Thanks again.