Tramps and Trade Union Travelers

Internal Migration and Organized Labor in Gilded Age America, 1870–1900

Kim Moody

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781608467570
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones laborales e industriales

Why has there been no viable, independent labor party in the United States? Many people assert “American exceptionalist” arguments, which state a lack of class-consciousness and union tradition among American workers is to blame. While the racial, ethnic, and gender divisions within the American working class have created organizational challenges for the working class, Moody uses archival research to argue that despite their divisions, workers of all ethnic and racial groups in the Gilded Age often displayed high levels of class consciousness and political radicalism. In place of “American exceptionalism,” Moody contends that high levels of internal migration during the late 1800’s created instability in the union and political organizations of workers. Because of the tumultuous conditions brought on by the uneven industrialization of early American capitalism, millions of workers became migrants, moving from state to state and city to city. The organizational weakness that resulted undermined efforts by American workers to build independent labor-based parties in the 1880s and 1890s. Using detailed research and primary sources; Moody traces how it was that ‘pure-and-simple’ unionism would triumph by the end of the century despite the existence of a significant socialist minority in organized labor at that time.

Chapter 1

CLASS FORMATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN GILDED-AGE AMERICA

The process of class formation is always and everywhere difficult. In no way does it resemble a victory march.

—Michelle Perrot¹

We cannot overlook the fact that at the present time the relations subsisting between capitalists and laborers are those of war, and intense conflict of interests.

—Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of California, Fifth Biennial Report, 1893²

Whereas a struggle is going on in all the nations of the civilized world, between the oppressors and the oppressed of all countries, a struggle between capital and labor, which must grow in intensity from year to year.

—Preamble to the Constitution of the American Federation of Labor, adopted 1886³

Like class formation, class consciousness necessarily takes shape in the context of the changes in society itself that occur over time. The rise of industrial capitalism in the decades following the US Civil War saw not only the formation of new social classes but also changes in the way those who belonged to these rising classes viewed the world and each other. Measuring class consciousness or even defining it with much precision is, however, a difficult task. The place to start, perhaps, is to specify what it is not. Above all, class consciousness cannot be measured or defined in terms of simple dualities: “false” versus “revolutionary” consciousness; Lenin’s later abandoned dichotomy between “trade union” and “political” consciousness; or the oft-cited “in itself” versus that “for itself” duality, wrongly attributed to Marx.⁴ Nor is it valid to equate class consciousness with socialist ideology or politics, which evolve over time, if at all, as both Sombart and Perlman do. To do this, as Thompson argues, is “to disclose class-consciousness, not as it is, but as it ought to be.”⁵ Even granting that class consciousness must have some clear content, simple dualities or fixed ideological equations cannot define the perceptions of society and sets of related values and views that compose a class consciousness in formation that, like social classes themselves, takes shape over time.

Here class consciousness will be defined as E. P. Thompson defined it. Class is first of all a “historical relationship,” in this case the relations of production, which “must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.” Thus, “class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.”⁶ That is, there are two dimensions to this basic class consciousness: a general identity of wageworkers as a class in formation, and the perception of the emerging capitalist class or employers as different and opposed to the interests of the working class. This is the view of class consciousness taken here, and it will be argued that this sort of consciousness emerged in the US between 1870 and the 1880s and was sustained despite organizational and political changes into the twentieth century.

Class consciousness arises and is shaped through experience. As Thompson puts it, “experience is a necessary middle term between social being and social consciousness.”⁷ In the broadest terms, for the Gilded Age, this experience involved what Schneirov described as the transition “from a self-employed or free labor mode of production to a capitalist one”—namely, to wage labor and the degradation of work that went with it.⁸ The transition from the self-employment of the artisan to the wage labor of the majority of manual workers and an increasing number of service workers necessarily had an impact on those who became wage laborers, regardless of their previous modes of labor or nationality. Their experience in the maelstrom of the postbellum industrial revolution was not unlike that of the English working class in its earlier transition to industrial society described by Thompson.

Experience, however, runs up against what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called “common sense”—not “the obvious” or “sensible,” as American or British usage often implies, but a “traditional conception of the world.” Class consciousness in this view is always contradictory to one extent or another.⁹ Certainly many in the working class of the Gilded Age accepted much of this sort of common sense: the patriarchal family, degrees of racism, religion, and the sanctity of the republic as it existed in the US.

Gramsci provided an enriched explanation for this in the concept of hegemony, or “the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group.” This consent, however, does not imply agreement and is never total so that a “state coercive power” is required at times to discipline “those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively.”¹⁰ Certainly this dialectic between consent and repression describes events in both early nineteenth-century England and late nineteenth-century America.

Nevertheless, while the notion of hegemony gives us a glimpse of the contest of values and views that must have affected the minds of working-class people, it has limits. As Leon Fink argued in a debate with those who would deny the existence of oppositional culture in the working class of the Gilded Age, “But if hegemony theory might best be restricted to a textured civil society (which differs from a slave regime, in that consent is a real issue), it also might be better applied to the absence, rather than the presence, of protest.”¹¹ For working-class protest in just about every conceivable form was present throughout the Gilded Age on a massive scale, indicating the limits of capitalist “hegemony.”

Thus, class consciousness arose first as “an identity of interest” among wageworkers in opposition to the newly emerging industrial capitalists, but not as a commonly held consistent ideology. Rather, in Gilded-Age America, this class consciousness contained both shared goals and competing ideas for how to deal with the new state of permanent wage labor and the industrial capitalist class that was imposing it, much as it had earlier in Britain. While becoming aware of basic class differences between labor, now defined as wage labor, and capital, now seen not just as accumulated wealth or factory and equipment but also as a distinct class of people, this new consciousness clung to old ideas such as the Victorian family, distinct racial characteristics, and republicanism, but in a new context that required modification or challenges to some of these. As Leon Fink suggests, these traditional ideas sometimes provided both the means of legitimizing opposition and alternatives (for example, the cooperative commonwealth) as well as sources of division and confusion. But they did not prevent the growth of the movement or sufficiently explain its eventual demise in the case of the Knights of Labor.¹²

The enormous changes in circumstance and experience necessarily brought shared changes in the language and, hence, new ways of viewing “labor.” As Bruce Laurie described this transition,

Recognizably modern words and economic institutions replaced older ones. No one spoke of artisans, mechanics, or even master craftsmen by the closing decades of the nineteenth century: these terms went the way of the wooden plow, the keelboat, and the journeyman shoemaker’s lap stone. Indeed, wage workers did not refer to themselves as journeymen any longer. Distinctions of skill endured and even sharpened, but manual employees thought of them-selves as workers, just as employers became manufacturers or businessmen.¹³

Indeed, the very word “labor” was transformed in meaning from its earlier “free labor” connotation as a fluid state in which one moved from employee to master to “labor” as a permanent class of wage earners. As Sarah Watts put it, by the late nineteenth century, “the term labor had come to denote a distinct class of wage workers, separated by the growth of workers’ neighborhoods, widened by the ‘alien’ ways of immigrants, and distanced by the growing inequities of economic distribution.”¹⁴ The term that was most commonly used to describe this new social reality was “wageworker.” Michael Kazin is mistaken when he argues that the word most used in the rhetoric of the Knights of Labor was “producer.”¹⁵ While this was the general definition of who might join the Knights, even the preamble and declaration of principles of the Knights refers to the “laborer,” the “toiler,” the “industrial classes,” and only once to the “producing masses.”¹⁶ Indeed, officially for one to become a member, he or she “must be, or must have been at some time, a wage-worker,” according to Knights grand secretary Robert Layton, although like so many of the Knights’ “rules,” this was no doubt frequently violated.¹⁷

Throughout the trade-union and labor press of the time, the words that appeared over and over were “worker,” “wage worker,” “laborer,” “workingmen,” “working classes,” “working class,” “industrial classes,” “laboring classes,” and “wage-slave.” This last term received a vigorous defense in the pages of the Knights of Labor’s Journal of United Labor in 1883 when a member criticized the use of “wage-slave” “in speaking of the condition of the toiler.” In an editorial, the journal replied that “the term is not mis-applied however harsh it may sound.”¹⁸ While “proletariat” was not much used in the US, it is interesting that one of the most popular Knights of Labor songs in the 1880s was precisely the “Song of the Proletaire: Dedicated to the Wage Workers of the World.”¹⁹

The “labor question,” as it was then called, became one of the dominant economic and social concerns of the nation in the years following the Civil War, on a par with the tariff and the currency. It was sparked by the economic turmoil of the era, but as Rosanne Currarino writes in The Labor Question in America, “Most of all, though, it was linked to the increasing number of permanent wage workers and the declining number of independent, self-employed producers.” By the end of the Civil War, she notes, “there were now 2.5 wage workers for every self-employed man.”²⁰ By 1870 in Pennsylvania, 65–75 percent of the economically active population worked for someone else, while in Massachusetts it was already 75–85 percent.²¹ And 1870 was, of course, just at the beginning of the process.

What Some Observers Thought About Class

All of this was widely recognized at the time. Looking at the social wreckage of the long depression that began in 1873, economist David Wells observed in mid-1877 that with lands in the West “exhausted” or sold, the “American laborer without capital” could no longer, as was previously the case, “raise himself from the position of laborer, dependent on others for employment to the position of capitalist.” As the changes Wells saw commenced, he wrote, “The United States will have entered upon a new social order of things; an order of things similar to what exists in the more densely populated countries of the Old World, in which the tendency is for a man born a laborer, working for hire, to never be anything but a laborer.”²²

Wells had, in effect, announced the death of the old “free labor” ideology that saw wage labor as merely temporary and advancement out of the wage-earing class open to all but the lazy or incompetent. Only two years later, the Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics drew the same conclusion, noting that the “rapid concentration of capital, the massing of machinery in immense workshops” had led to “the destruction of the possibility of the workman becoming his own employer.”²³ Writing in 1889, by which time the scale of industry, finance, and commerce were clear to all, economist Richard T. Ely put the arrival of permanent wage labor in simple numerical terms: “Every railroad president necessitates the existence of several thousand wage-receivers; every bank president presumes clerks, book-keepers, and others in subordinate positions; every merchant of wealth requires numerous salaried employés. By no human possibility can this be otherwise.”²⁴

Wells and Ely were not alone in observing the rise of a class of permanent wageworkers. Currarino notes that “by the late 1870s, as testimony before a House subcommittee shows, some ordinary Americans feared that the era of the small proprietary producer was ending and that they were now fated permanently to live as wage workers.”²⁵ This was the first in a series of congressional hearings on the topic of the “relations of labor and capital” throughout this period. Scarcely six years later, in hearings before a Senate committee, other observers described the change in relations between the workers and their employers that accompanied the growth of permanent wage labor. Herbert Newton, an Episcopal minister from Long Island, told the Senate committee in 1883:

The factory system is a new feudalism, in which the master rarely deals directly with his hands. Superintendents, managers, and “bosses” stand between him and them. He does not know them; they do not know him. The old common feeling is disappearing.²⁶

In a similar vein, the editor of a New York newspaper, which he described as “the organ of the manufacturers,” told the Senate of the way workers and employers viewed each other:

There has been a very thorough change in that respect within the last ten or fifteen years. The old confidential relation between the American employer and his employees has ceased to exist. They look at each other now more or less as enemies, at least in certain branches of business. Each party thinks the other his enemy.²⁷

Thomas Miller, general manager of the Atlas Works in Pittsburgh, blamed this social distance on the unions. He told the Senate, “I don’t think they have been so friendly since the unions have been esta...