Reinventing "The People"

The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism

Shelton Stromquist

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252072697, 9780252030260
• eBook ISBN: 9780252092619
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A comprehensive study of the Progressive movement, Reinventing "The People"contends that the persistence of class conflict in America challenged the very defining feature of Progressivism: its promise of social harmony through democratic renewal. 

Shelton Stromquist profiles the movement's work in diverse arenas of social reform, politics, labor regulation and so-called race improvement. While these reformers emphasized different programs, they crafted a common language of social reconciliation in which an imagined civic community--"the People"--would transcend parochial class and political loyalties. But efforts to invent a society without enduring class lines marginalized new immigrants and African Americans by declaring them unprepared for civic responsibilities. In so doing, Progressives laid the foundation for twentieth-century liberals' inability to see their world in class terms and to conceive of social remedies that might alter the structures of class power.

1

The Labor Problem and
the Crisis of the Old Order

We declare that there is an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican system of government. . . . It is war—war against the divine rights of humanity; war against the principles of our government. There is no mutuality of interests, no cooperative union of labor and capital. It is the iron heel of a soulless monopoly, crushing the manhood out of sovereign citizens. . . . The mob can be put down for a while; but the spirit of hate that now centres upon the great monopolies will soon extend to the government that acts as their protector.

—George McNeill, The Labor Movement:
The Problem of Today, 1886

Stalwart labor reformer George McNeill spoke for a growing segment of working-class partisans in the 1880s who believed class conflict had become an endemic feature of industrial society and saw a war of seemingly irreconcilable class interests as inevitable. Nearly a year after the great railroad strikes of 1877, McNeill addressed a grand labor parade and picnic in Chicago on July 4, 1878, and railed against what he called “a serious and bloody communistic conspiracy” of “railroad kings, merchant princes and cotton lords” who “proposed to reduce workmen to the level of paupers and take from them the elective franchise.” He claimed that “there is a war between capital and labor . . . a war that we don't like, and which is the result of the separate and distinct interests of the two classes.” He preferred the cooperation that would result from the “perfect organization of the working classes,” but he knew that “strikes are justifiable as a means.” Even though he had on occasion counseled against them, he advocated strikes rather than “submission.”¹

McNeill's talk of a war of classes resonated with particular force among members of a generation that had experienced firsthand a different civil war of unprecedented dimensions. As the wounds of that war healed and the aftermath of the secession crisis receded, Americans found themselves in the throes of industrial changes that again tore at the social fabric. Industrial change had spawned conflict that touched the lives of ordinary citizens, and Americans of all stations worried about what their futures might hold.

The language of class permeated late-nineteenth-century America. The years of economic expansion following the Civil War had produced new hierarchies of power and privilege that seemed to threaten the virtuous republican commonwealth. Amid the frenzy of railroad speculation, the machinations of western land speculators, and the cost cutting of a new breed of manufacturing entrepreneurs, self-described producers confronted what they perceived to be a dangerous new parasitic class of nonproducers. The fact that these “robber barons” benefited directly from government policies that financed railroad development, regulated land sales, and deflated the value of paper currency confirmed suspicions that undemocratic influences had already gained control of the political process. In the face of such threats, a class appeal to join in defense of the sanctity of republican institutions and the egalitarian ideals of the American revolution resonated powerfully.

Antebellum conceptions of a society divided between virtuous artisan republicans and parasitic masters took on new meaning in the post–Civil War era. New conceptions of class difference drew on several sources of inspiration. First, the rhetoric of “wage slavery” acquired renewed power to evoke both the onerous dependency bred by the “wages system” and the prospect that, like chattel slavery, it too might be abolished. In a nation where more than two-thirds of the working population had become “hirelings for life,” the vast majority of people experienced the wages system on a daily basis.² Yet industrial capitalism as a system for organizing the labor of a large, propertyless population was new enough that many Americans could plausibly imagine alternative, cooperative arrangements by which labor might be organized and deployed.³ Second, the state had acquired new functions and unimagined powers during the Civil War crisis. Government became not simply an instrument of total war but also the vehicle for confiscating illegitimate property (slaves) and reconstructing a morally and economically bankrupt society (the South).⁴ Members of the producing classes began to conceive a state that might acquire and operate railroads, telephones and telegraphs, coal mines, and even manufacturing monopolies, or that might construct and finance a vast network of cooperative warehouses and granaries. Third, new organizations embodying producerist values and fostering a “movement culture” gained legions of adherents and expanded influence. This organizational ferment testified to the existence of a society divided into warring classes. The Knights of Labor (KOL) and Farmers’ Alliance became powerful national organizations in the 1880s and influenced a generation of workers, farmers, and their reform allies to believe in the possibility that through their leadership the producing classes might reconstruct American society.⁵

But the producers’ language actually spoke for a narrower class than their rhetoric implied. Social boundaries defined by masculinity and whiteness in most circumstances shut out women, African Americans, and Chinese immigrants from what has been called the “lodge democracy” of white men.⁶ On occasion, a dispossessed working class struggled with some success to transcend those divisive boundaries of race and gender. In Richmond, Virginia, during the heyday of the Knights of Labor, on the New Orleans docks in the early 1890s, among black and white sharecroppers in Oklahoma and Texas, in some locals of the fledgling United Mine Workers of America, or in the ranks of the United Garment Workers, tenuous alliances joined white and black producers or led male workers to support the organizing of women.⁷ But to a significant degree, race and gender—whiteness and masculinity— functioned in ways that privileged white male workers and excluded others from the benefits of collective organization.⁸

By any measure, the last decades of the late nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented social turmoil. With unrelenting labor strife, a population in perpetual motion, deepening urban social problems, legions of new arrivals joining an already swollen immigrant working class, and parasitical politicians who fed at the troughs of corporate franchise holders, society's middle seemed incapable of holding together. The middling classes had formed a self-conscious presence in American society at least since the 1840s. As proponents of common school education, middle-brow cultural respectability, and an ideology of separate spheres of the sexes, they viewed themselves as apostles of measured economic growth, social stability, and republican national purpose.⁹ But in the contentious environment of the late nineteenth century, their reform efforts achieved only limited success. Elite “mugwump” reformers challenged urban boss rule in cities and states with only limited success. Christian social gospel reformers addressed the proliferating problems of industrial society but with marginal influence. Proponents of economic fairness, conciliation, and government regulation of corporate excess won few, largely ephemeral victories. Middle-class women focused their considerable reform energies on the liquor question and the campaign to police the social behavior of the immigrant working class. But there, too, victories were few.¹⁰ When Minneapolis editor Ignatius Donnelley spoke to the Populists’ Omaha convention in 1892 of the “two great classes—tramps and millionaires,” he described a social order in which the middle had given way to a contention of opposing classes. Middle-class reformers of a new generation would take up the task of restoring and enlarging the social middle in the name of the people.¹¹

Class conflict lay at the heart of the social crisis of the late nineteenth century and reformers’ preoccupation with the class problem. At stake was what kind of industrial society America would become. Reformers brought different prescriptions to the table. Some argued for an aggressive and fundamental redistribution of social and economic power; others sought to create social machinery that could reconcile the interests of antagonistic classes and promote social harmony. Both groups foresaw the use of state power to curtail the excesses of corporations but in different measures. While at times overlapping, these perspectives represented distinct and often conflicting tendencies. In the last decade of the century, a discernible group of Progressive reformers emerged to claim space for their social vision and leadership in the project of social reconstruction. By claiming their own organizational and ideological space, they challenged the producers’ conception of a society divided along class lines. This Progressive movement articulated with increasing confidence the proposition that class conflict could be transcended, social harmony between classes orchestrated, and a classless citizenry—the people—made the agents of democratic renewal. But the problem of reconstructing society along such lines remained formidable in the face of the massive social crisis unleashed by industrialization.

Encountering the Labor Problem

Reformers had made tentative first steps in the 1870s and 1880s to come to grips with the spreading class antagonism that confronted them on all sides. Their task was to master the “labor problem.” By doing so, they believed they could restore the conditions under which a truly democratic people might flourish.

By the early 1880s, the labor problem had grown to formidable proportions. A young economist, Richard T. Ely, returned from Europe in 1880 to find the country in upheaval. Like many of his generation, he had acquired at European centers of learning theoretical tools that led him to question the laissez-faire orthodoxy that reigned in America. Confronted with the seething conflict between labor and capital that had erupted in the railroad strikes of 1877 and continued to unsettle the surface of economic prosperity, Ely identified a set of problems that would shape his life as a reformer and educator. As he walked the streets of New York, seeking to make sense of what he encountered, he later recalled, “I took upon myself a vow to write in behalf of the laboring classes.”¹² His Christian values, more than his training in political economy, suggested the posture he initially would adopt.

Ely and his fellow academic “young rebels” gathered ample evidence of labor's rising strength in the mid-188os.¹³ In one report, he celebrated the ascending fortunes of the Knights of Labor: “Keep off the track! The train of progress is coming! Prepare the way! It rests with us so to direct inevitable changes that we may be brought nearer that kingdom of righteousness for which all good Christians long and pray.”¹⁴ Ely's relationship to the labor movement would be more complicated than these euphoric comments, penned in the midst of the “great upheaval,” suggest. As the costs of identification with labor rose for members of the academic community in the early 1890s, and as the limits of their intellectual commitment to collectivist reforms surfaced, they would join a growing movement of reformers seeking a middle ground in a class-torn society.

But the society rent by class conflict that Ely and his fellow young political economists encountered had roots in the harsh depression conditions of the 1870s. A rapidly deflating economy following the panic of 1873 and the massive unemployment, wage cuts, and social dislocation that came in its wake produced disorientation, fear, and mounting anger among workers. The railroad strikes of 1877 served as a detonator for their accumulating discontents.¹⁵

The railroad strikes seemed to sweep across the country like wildfire, jumping from one railroad center to another. In some places—mostly the smaller railroad towns of the East and Midwest—workers enlisted their communities in a battle that they understood to be part of a larger campaign against monopoly's strangulation of the economy. In the larger cities—Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis—the specter of a war between the classes loomed. “Mobs” comprising a cross-section of urban workers responded with vengeance to police and military intervention and the bloodshed it precipitated. As casualties mounted and flames engulfed railroad property, respectable opinion called for massive intervention by the authorities and the liberal use of force to stem the rebellion. And as the railroads tallied their losses in smoldering freight yards, they also debated new measures for avoiding or controlling such conflict in the future.¹⁶

After the 1877 strikes, a cacophony of reform proposals rose from a chorus of voices. Some, such as Robert Harris, president of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, called for conciliation and welfare measures that would cultivate loyalty and concede the legitimate grievances of valued employees. Others, such as his own vice president, Charles Perkins, warned against coddling workers or in any way disguising the harsh and rigorous lessons of the iron law of supply and demand.¹⁷

Strike activity after 1877 did not subside, nor did it appear that labor conflict might easily be resolved.¹⁸ By virtually every measure, strikes increased in number and magnitude. Of particular note, strikes over “control issues” rose sharply. With more workers organized in unions, the discipline of organization produced more, not fewer, strikes.¹⁹

Strikes against the Gould lines in 1884–86, the wave of strikes by workers newly affiliated with the Knights of Labor in 1885–86, and the eight-hour general strike of May 1886 were unprecedented. The numbers of workers engaged in sympathy strikes rose dramatically. The spread of a “contagious” class feeling infected large segments of the working class, especially in the early 1890s. On the railroads, the proportion of strikers involved in sympathetic actions rose from 11 percent in 1885 to 45 percent in 1887. In 1894, the year of the Pullman boycott, 85 percent of all railroad strikers participated in sympathy strikes.²⁰ The strikes of workers in other sectors of the economy paralleled those of the railroads.

Taken together, these patterns of collective action suggest that an “audacious” spirit of resistance during these years took hold of large segments of the American working class and transcended incremental calculations of costs and benefits. They fought not simply to improve their working conditions but also to assert more fundamental rights. At stake were their dignity and their right to imagine a future for themselves different from the one employers prescribed.²¹ These developments deeply troubled would-be reformers, who saw little common ground for class reconciliation in this deepening chasm of conflict.

Employers and Workers Organize

Against the backdrop of the deepening labor crisis, employers as well as workers girded for battle. Despite the factionalism that infected both camps between 1885 and 1895, each experienced significant organizational growth. Few employers had yet mastered the “science” of managing large firms and armies of employees. Beyond a few sectors—railroads, textiles, iron and steel, and machinery manufacture—small, locally owned firms continued to dominate the industrial landscape. A social Darwinian model of competition fit the world of business under conditions of price deflation. Survival, let alone expansion, required ruthlessness and luck, even in a bounteous continental economy with rapidly expanding markets and abundant resources.²²

Where large-scale firms predominated and bureaucratic management first appeared, attention to labor matters remained casual. Despite the strong impulse among railroads and other firms to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Progressives and the Problem of Class
• 1. The Labor Problem and the Crisis of the Old Order
• 2. Constituting Progressivism
• 3. The Politics of Reform
• 4. Communities of Reformers
• 5. Class Bridging and the World of Female Reform
• 6. The Boundaries of Difference
• 7. Class Wars and the Crisis of Progressivism
• Conclusion: War and the Ragged Edges of Reform
• Notes
• Index