There were also significant changes in the industrial sector. When we speak of industrial production we are talking about the factory, mass production and the rise of the modern corporation. Before the Civil War most businesses employed between five and twenty-five workers. A great deal of the work was done by hand. Skilled craftsmen, called artisans, did the work. A shoe maker constructed the entire shoe, a tailor made the entire garment, and so on. But as new technology and machinery was invented, the work was broken down into simple tasks. One person did the sleeves, and only the sleeves. One person did only the soles of the shoes, and machines stitched the tongue to the soles. For skilled workers this represented the erosion of their jobs. Artisans who owned their own small shops were replaced by large mass production factories with semi-skilled workers and machines. This created the demand for an urban working class, and class of people who might never become self-employed owners but would remain all their lives wage workers. This was a departure from the traditional American way of life. In 1790 95% of the people had been farmers, and only 5% had been urban workers. However, as industry changed the way that work was organized, the labor movement emerged as an equal and opposite reaction.

MASS PRODUCTION AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM

One of the important pioneers was Thomas Scott. In the 1850s he integrated seventy-three smaller railroad companies and more than 5,000 rail miles (track) into the Pennsylvania Railroad.(Enduring Vision, 571). The PA Railroad was a pioneer in what eventually would become the holding company. By 1900 America would have 193,000 miles of railroad track-more than all of Europe combined.

Another titan of industrialization was Andrew Carnegie. He was born in Scotland in 1835 and his family emigrated from Scotland to America. In 1848 they moved to Allegheny, PA. In 1853 Carnegie became the personal secretary and telegrapher to Thomas Scott (note the ethnic connection), and then district superintendent of the PA Railroad. He became involved in bridge construction. In 1872 he met Sir Henry Bessemer, the inventor of the new Bessemer process for making steel. Thereafter Carnegie went into steel making. In 1882 he bought the Homestead works, near Pittsburgh. When other firms ran into difficulty during recessionary periods, Carnegie bought them up, sometimes at distress prices.

In those days every step in the production process tended to be owned by a different small company. This was called dispersed production. Carnegie's response was "continuous flow" or "vertical integration." In vertical integration all phases of production, from taking the raw material out of the ground to the finished product, are brought under the centralized and coordinated control of a single company.

Carnegie brought all phases of production under the control of a single company. He bought his own iron ore and coal mines; his own fleet of barges and railroads to transport the ore to his plants; his own docks, shipyards and warehouses; his own smelters; his own rolling mills; his own fabricating mills and foundries; and developed his own marketing agents and salesmen. At each step he cut out a middleman, and kept the profit for himself. From the time the ore came out of the ground to the time that the finished product was sold, the product was controlled by a single integrated company. Carnegie also located the foundries, mills, smelters and so on next to each other to increase efficiency and cut costs. Of course, if you were one of the middlemen being "cut out," Carnegie was ruining you. To you, in the past, the business had been spread around and many people got a piece of it. Now Carnegie was "hogging" or monopolizing all of it for himself. In fact, Carnegie was able to produce his product more efficiently and cheaply than many of his competitors. He cut his prices, and they could not keep up and were ruined and driven out of business. Carnegie's approach was to undersell his competitors and in this way increase his market share. His approach was to out-compete everyone else.

Please note that vertical integration involves combining together things that are different. Later on, (1901) J.P. Morgan bought Carnegie Steel for half a billion dollars and merged it with Federal Steel and many other companies to create US Steel. It controlled 80% of the steel production in the US. (Enduring Vision, p. 576).

John D. Rockefeller was another titan of the Gilded Age. He was born in New York State. As a youth he traveled to Cleveland, Ohio. In 1859 oil was found at Titusville, in western Pennsylvania. Rockefeller realized that lots of people owned oil wells or land that had oil under it, in those days. But oil was useless unless it was REFINED. The opportunity for profit then was in oil REFINING. In 1862 he entered the oil business, and in 1879 he established Standard Oil Company of OHIO. Rockefeller, like Carnegie, applied the principles of vertical integration. Standard oil owned its own oil refineries, oil fields, pipelines, and factories for producing the cans and barrels that the refined oil and kerosene were sold in. Before the invention of the lightbulb and electrical lighting, many people relied on kerosene lamps for lighting.

Standard oil responded to the problem of competition in a way very different from Carnegie. Carnegie sought to produce steel ever more cheaply and efficiently, and ruined his competitors by underselling them. In contrast, Rockefeller's approach was to attempt to fix prices and control the supply to reduce "excess" competition.

Overproduction of oil and intense competition among refiners drove down prices and profits. As Rockefeller lamented, "the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker began to refine oil. As a result, the price went down and down until the trade was ruined" (Tindall and Shi, America: Narrative History, Vol 2, p. 788). If oil refiners limited competition by "cooperating" (fixing or colluding) on prices, they could stabilize the market. Rockefeller regarded too much competition as destructive.

In 1872 Rockefeller acquired the South Improvement Company, which he made the marketing agent for a large percentage of his oil shipments. He gained clout with the railroads, as a large shipper, and forced them to give him rebates on the standard freight rates in order to keep his business. Little companies had to pay the regular price. As a huge customer, the railroads gave him a discounted, preferential rate, because they feared to lose his business. This would be exposed to the public about 1903.

Horizontal integration involves "joining line with like." In other words, it consists of merges and acquisitions and buying other companies that are in the same line of business. So, for example, an oil refinery would buy up other oil refineries; steel producers would buy other steel producers; railroads would buy railroads; later on, airlines would buy other airlines. In this way, eventually a company gains a near monopoly over a particular industry. By 1879 Standard Oil, through a subsidiary (United Pipe Lines), controlled most of the pipelines from the Appalachian fields to the East. Standard Oil controlled 90-95% of the oil refining in the U.S. It came close to being a monopoly.

Vertical integration involves acquiring units of production that are different in function.

US Steel, with control of 80% of the steel production in the U.S. in 1901, also came close to being a monopoly. Increasingly, toward 1900, in industry after industry, a few large firms controlled most of the industry. This pattern of competition among a few large firms is called oligopoly. It is also the "rise of big business." Mass production or the factory system or industrial capitalism would require vast investments of capital to finance the purchase of expensive equipment and mergers and acquisitions. This led to finance capitalism. The rise of big business, and the abuses and excesses of that system, would give rise to an equal and opposite reaction by workers, in the form of mass production unionism or the rise of "big labor."

RISE OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT

After the Civil War the American labor movement "comes into its own." This is in response to the changes taking place in the economy and in demographics, or population changes. As the factory system and task breakdown developed, artisans organized to resist it.

NATIONAL LABOR UNION

In 1866 Ira Stewart and George McNeill formed one of the first labor federations in America. It was called the National Labor Union. In 1868 William Sylvis of the iron molders became president. The NLU urged producers to form cooperatives as an alternative to the wage system. In 1872 it sponsored the Labor Reform Party, but the effort failed and the NLU collapsed.

KNIGHTS OF LABOR

In 1869 Uriah Stephens formed the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, in Phila. The Knights were largely WASP (British American and Protestant) in leadership and membership. They believed in one big union that embraced everyone, men and women, skilled and unskilled, employers and workers, merchants and farmers. Their main goals were the 8 hour day and the abolition of child labor, and the arbitration of labor disputes rather than strikes. By 1878 they had 50,000 members. Their most prominent leader was Terrence Powderly.

The first great labor explosion was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. As I mentioned previously, there was a Depression in 1873. The railroads cut wages. In July 1877 they cut wages 10%. The day after the announcement of the wage cut railroad workers at Martinsburg, W. VA walked out and blocked the tracks. However the strike degenerated into a mob that burned and plundered railroad property. Walkouts and demonstrations of sympathy spread into a national railroad strike. In Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Buffalo and San Francisco there were pitched battles between militia and strikers and sympathizers. In Pittsburgh these battles raged for 3 days. At Pittsburgh 26 people were killed, and every single railroad car and 160 locomotives were destroyed. Every railroad building in Pittsburgh was set afire. The federal government sent in the army to put down the nationwide strike. Indeed, the troops that Rutherford B. Hayes pulled out of the South were brought north to quell the disturbances. In San Francisco and Denver the strikers attacked the Chinese, and in San Francisco destroyed 25 Chinese-run laundries (Enduring Vision, p. 595). The strikers felt that the Chinese were taking jobs from native-born American workers, and the demand to end Chinese immigration to the U.S. was raised, and in 1882 would become law.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was blamed on foreign

agitators.

THE HAYMARKET INCIDENT

Labor conditions in the nineteenth century were appalling. Many workers worked 10 or 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. In some cases people even worked 14 and 16 hours a day. Conditions were often dangerous and unsanitary. There was very little accident and unemployment insurance. The cherished dream of American labor was the eight-hour day. In May 1886 the Knights of Labor and a number of other unions launched a national campaign for the 8-hour day. They sought to pressure employers into agreeing to the 8-hour day. On May 1st, 340,000 workers nationwide walked off the job. In Chicago, on May 3, 1886, at the McCormick Harvester Company, several hundred striking workers clashed with strike breakers outside the McCormick factory. Police "restored order" by firing on the strikers. The strikers alleged police brutality. The following night, May 4, several thousand workers gathered in Haymarket Square to protest police brutality. The police attempted to disperse the crowd, and a dynamite bomb exploded. In the violence and confusion that followed, known to history as the Haymarket Massacre, 7 policemen and 4 workers were killed and 50 others injured.

Eight anarchists were blamed for the incident. Anarchists are people who believe in the abolition of government or the state. All eight were found guilty. Seven were sentenced to death. The eighth suspect was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Ultimately 2 of the 7 who were sentenced to death had their sentences commuted by the governor (Altgeld). One committed suicide in prison, and 4 were hanged.

The Haymarket Eight were German immigrants: Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fisher, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab and Oscar Neebe. The prosecution never produced a shred of evidence to prove that these eight men had anything to do with the bombing. But in the atmosphere of panic and hysteria the "respectable" elements of society demanded blood. Somebody had to pay for what had happened. Someone had to be punished. And these men had the "wrong" politics, and they were immigrants besides. Many historians doubt their guilt, and believe they were simply scapegoats. Haymarket was a trauma for the nation. It was an important symbol or image. It represented violent conflict between different interest groups. Since the Revolution Americans had assumed they lived in a harmonious society with no classes. The Great Railway Strike of 1877 and the Haymarket Incident of 1886 came as a shock. Haymarket caused the labor movement to seem violent, and radical, and caused it to look like the revolutionary class warfare described by Karl Marx in Europe. The Haymarket Incident, together with other incidents, played into the hands of the opponents of the labor movement. Business labeled and stigmatized the labor movement as radical and as violent. The labor movement was portrayed as wild-eyed, crazy, bomb throwing fanatics, carried away with foreign, subversive, revolutionary ideas. Of course it was alien, and un-American. It was the fault of the immigrants.

The Haymarket Incident derailed the 1886 national campaign for the 8-hour day, and Terrence Powderly of the Knights of Labor sought to save his organization by condemning the eight suspects. However to many working people this looked like a sell-out.

THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR

In 1886 the American Federation of Labor was founded. The AF of L emerged directly in opposition to the Knights of Labor. The Knights sought to organize workers on a geographic basis. All the workers, skilled or unskilled alike, in all crafts in a given town or city or region, belonged to a local union.

In contrast the AF of L was based on crafts. All the workers in a particular craft or trade, in a given location, would be organized in a local craft union. Thus the electricians, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, steam fitters, etc. were all in separate unions. Unskilled workers who did not know a craft or trade were excluded. And whereas the Knights opposed strikes, the AF of L definitely believed that strikes were necessary. They felt the strike was the only weapon the workers had. After a disastrous railway strike in 1886 and Terrence Powderly's denunciation of the Haymarket Eight, popular support for the Knights quickly declined.

THE HOMESTEAD STRIKE OF JULY 1892

In the steel industry in 1892 there were signs of a downturn, as demand for steel decreased. In response to this declining demand for steel, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick sought to reduce the wages of their workers at Carnegie Steel at Homestead, near Pittsburgh. They also wanted to eliminate the union. Management wanted a sliding scale for wages. If the price of steel rose, wages would rise. If the price of steel fell, so would wages. The dispute was over the floor, or how low wages might fall. This was a minimum guarantee. Once the price of steel per ton reached a certain low-point, wages would be frozen and would not go down any further. The question was, what would be the price of steel per ton that would trigger this minimum, or this wage freeze. Carnegie and Frick wanted to set the floor at $22 per ton of steel. The union wanted the floor set at $25 per ton of steel.

In June 1892 Carnegie sailed off to a vacation at his castle in Scotland. He left Frick in charge. Frick ordered a massive stockade to be erected around the ironworks, complete with watchtowers, rifle slits and barbed wire. He then ordered 300 private guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. These would serve as a private army for management. The plan was to close the ironworks, install the Pinkertons secretly during the night, and re-open with non-union help. But the plan to sail the Pinkertons down the river on barges at night and then secretly let them into the ironworks failed. Harold Livesay wrote:

"The workers foiled the plan. They spotted the barges passing through Pittsburgh and sent word ahead. The alarm sounded; the population of Homestead rushed to the river bank and launched a ferocious though inept assault."
 
 

The battle lasted all day, July 6, 1892. The strikers and sympathizers from Homestead kept the Pinkertons pinned down on the barges and tried to kill every last one of them. That they failed testified only to their lack of skill, not to any lack of desire or effort. They put dynamite into the town cannon, to fire it at the Pinkertons, but it blew up. They poured oil on the river and set fire to it, but the wind blew it the wrong way. They threw a lighted stick of dynamite onto a barge. It landed in a bucket of water. They loaded a flatcar with blazing combustibles and pushed it down a track toward the barges. It derailed.

It was like some pathetic episode of The Roadrunner: nothing the coyote tried to do would work.

Finally, in the late afternoon, a truce was negotiated. The Pinkertons dropped their guns, and the strikers promised them safe conduct out of town. Unfortunately the promise could not be kept. The bystanders from Homestead, many of them the relatives of the strikers, attacked the Pinkertons anyway. They had to pass through a gauntlet of the howling mob. When the battle was over, 4 of the Pinkerton guards had been killed and all of the others injured.

Thereafter the governor of PA sent in 8,000 troops, who occupied the plant. A would-be assassin shot and stabbed Frick, who lived despite his wounds. In the end the union was crushed, and the plant reopened without any union. No effective union was established until the 1930s.

Various historians debate about the role of Carnegie in all this. Some feel he sailed off to Scotland and left Frick to do the dirty work. Carnegie suggested that he didn't realize Frick would take the measures that he did. While this is possible, we are also reminded of Ollie North, and plausible deniability. North insisted that CIA Director William Casey knew what he was doing, and President Ronald Reagan knew. Reagan denied that he knew.

Plausible deniability is when it cannot be proven that somebody knew something. And so therefore they can get away with saying they didn't know something that in fact they did know, but this cannot be proven. You make the call.

THE DEPRESSION OF 1893

In May 1893 the gold reserves in the U.S. treasury fell below $100 million. This provoked panic in the business community and a flight of capital. Businesses began to fail, people rushed to the banks to get their money, banks called in loans and the Depression of 1893-1987 descended upon the nation. By the end of 1893 some 2 million workers had lost their jobs. 15,000 businesses failed. 491 banks failed. By 1897 1/3rd of the railroad mileage in the entire United States was bankrupt and had gone into receivership.

Let me also point out that the Jacob Coxey march on Washington in support of public works occurs next, in March-May of 1894.

THE PULLMAN STRIKE (JUNE 21-JULY 20, 1894)

The Pullman Strike of June-July 1894 looked to people living at the time like class warfare. It was the most dramatic strike of the 1890s because it was a nationwide railroad strike, and it "took America by storm" as they say.

Between Sept. 1893 and May 1894 the Pullman Company cut wages by 25%. It claimed that this was necessary because of a decline in orders for Pullman sleeping cars. However the workers were discontent because in 1893 and 1894 the Pullman Company continued to pay the usual dividend of 8% to the stockholders. To the workers it seemed rather unfair and one-sided that their wages should be cut by 25%, while the dividends to the stockholders could not be reduced so much as 1%. Why were the dividends of the stockholders more important, more sacred, than the wages of the workers?

To make matters worse, the workers at the Pullman plant near Chicago lived in company-owned housing. They were required to do so. Rents at Pullman were 25% higher than in the surrounding communities. Pullman cut wages by 25% but rent remained exactly what it had been before. The workers were a kind of captive market. So in spring 1894 most of the Pullman workers joined the American Railway Union. In May a committee of workers met with George Pullman, the president and owner of the company. He refused to make any concessions. On May 10, three members of the grievance committee were dismissed from their jobs. The next day 3,000 workers went out on strike. The company then dismissed them, and the 300 who had not gone out on strike. And Pullman closed the plant.

The American Railway Union was very new. It had been organized the year before, in June 1893. Its foremost leader was Eugene Debs, of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. Debs' union united both skilled and unskilled workers, and by June 1894 had 100,000 members. Aware that the nation was in the depths of a depression, and 2 million were out of work, Debs warned against the Pullman strike. His union was only 1 year old and had very little in the way of strike funds, to tide people over during any strike. The Pullman delegation, however, pleaded for help from the national union. Their tales of woe and injustice aroused sympathy and emotion. Many other unions and locals had also suffered wage cuts in the depression, and they came to feel it was necessary to take a united stand against this. Further, the prestige of the young union was at stake. The ARU urged arbitration. The Pullman Company would not hear of it.

On June 26, 1894 the ARU asked all railroad companies to cut out the Pullman sleeping cars from their trains. A train might consist of a locomotive, some Pullman sleeping cars, and other passenger cars, maybe a mail car, etc. The union wanted the railroads to uncouple the Pullman cars from the others. If the railroads refused, the switchmen would refuse to switch the trains that included Pullman cars. If the switchmen were fired, all of the railroad workers would go out on strike.

Opposite the ARU was the General Managers Association. This was a federation of the 24 railroad companies with terminals in Chicago.

The railroad companies had contracts with Pullman. If they had cut his cars from their trains they could have been subject to civil suits by him for breach of contract. And therefore the railroads did not cut out the Pullman cars, and the switchmen would not switch the tracks, and a nationwide railroad strike ensued. Now not all railroad workers had joined the ARU, so some workers did not strike and some trains were running. This of course set up a conflict between the striking workers and those still trying to operate the trains.

Chicago was the hub of the national railway system. The strike paralyzed the railways in 27 Western states. Debs pleaded for non-violence. But on July 1, at Blue Island, near Chicago, a mob interfered with the passage of a train and there was a riot.

Grover Cleveland was in his second, non-consecutive term as president. The Attorney General was Richard Olney. Olney was a lawyer. In fact, he had been a railway lawyer and a corporation executive. You can imagine where his sympathies lay. With the riot at Blue Island, Attorney General Olney asked for a restraining order, and the court issued an injunction. Debs and the ARU ignored the injunction. On July 2, the next day, there was further violence and rioting at Blue Island. Olney now insisted that the strikers were interfering with the delivery of the mail, and the courts held that the strike was a conspiracy in restraint of trade and therefore a violation of the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

On July 3rd Olney persuaded President Cleveland that the situation was so serious that federal troops should be sent in. On July 4 federal troops took up position in Chicago under orders to protect interstate commerce and the U.S. mails.

The Governor of Illinois, the German-born John Altgeld, protested that federal interference was not needed. Washington ignored him.

There followed several days of rioting, directed against the federal troops. This left 4 dead and 20 wounded.

By this time, in the days before good refrigeration, food was becoming scarce in the cities of the East. Fuel was also scarce. Perishable commodities were rotting and spoiling everywhere.

On July 8 President Cleveland ordered all unlawful assemblages to disperse under threat of federal intervention and martial law. Further, thousands of the 2 million unemployed were flocking to the railroad companies seeking the jobs of the strikers.

On July 10 Debs and other strike leaders were arrested for conspiring to obstruct the mails and interfere with interstate commerce. He was soon released on bail, but the strike went down to defeat. The AF of L refused to enter the strike in support of the ARU, and the Chicago trade unions declined to support the ARU. By July 13 the trains were moving freely at Chicago, and the strike collapsed a week later.

Debs was charge with contempt of court for violating the injunction, and the Pullman workers went back to work on the old terms. The ARU was wrecked, and labor suffered one of its worst defeats.

In the fall of 1894, in the off-year elections, American workers exacted their revenge. They voted against Grover Cleveland's Democrats, whom they blamed for the depression and for hostility to labor. The workers and the people voted Republican. In fall 1894 the Republicans captured control of both houses of Congress, and held it for 16 years (until 1910). In 24 states not 1 single Democrat was elected to Congress. And in the 1896 Democratic convention, when Grover Cleveland ran against William Jennings Bryan, labor gave its support to Bryan. An incumbent president was denied the nomination of his own party.

THE LABOR PROBLEM

And over time, with Haymarket in 1886 and the Homestead strike of 1893 and the Pullman railway strike of 1894, the labor movement was labeled and stigmatized as violent and radical. The labor movement, the strikes, and the violence --on both sides-- which accompanied them, made Americans aware of conflict. Labor strife looked like class warfare. This shattered the image of America as a harmonious and classless society.

Workers sought the right to strike and to bargain collectively for better hours, wages, working conditions and work rules.

Business was vehemently opposed. In 1895 the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was founded. It opposed unions and collective bargaining in the name of "freedom of contract" and the "right to work." Business felt that the owners of businesses should be able to do whatever they wanted with their own property, and a business was property. And NAM organized an open-shop campaign in 1903.

Rhetorical question: Who was to blame for what happened at Homestead? In the Pullman Strike?

Increasingly, the public, especially the middle classes, came to feel that it was not in the best interests of the people to just stand idly by on the sidelines while management and labor "fought it out" and tore the country up in the meantime. Voices began to be raised that called upon government to go beyond laissez faire (let it be, leave it alone, do not interfere) and to intervene to preserve public order. The voices of reformers began to suggest that government had a constructive role to play, and should not let things get so out of hand that it came to the point of riots and violence in the first place. That a situation was allowed to deteriorate to such a point suggested that government had been negligent and had failed in some way. Maybe government, rather than taking a stance of non-interference, was needed to act as an umpire or referee between the combatants (business and labor).

The conflict and turmoil of Haymarket, Homstead, the Pullman Strike,etc. taught some Americans that government needed to serve as an "honest broker' or umpire. In 1898 Congress took a small step in that direction. It was very limited, but it set a precedent. Congress passed the Erdman Act. It provided for the arbitration of labor disputes on interstate carriers, such as trains. As other crises occurred later on in US history, the role of government as mediator and arbitrator would grow.* This was the "lesson" that was learned as a result of the Railway Strike of 1877, Haymarket, Homestead, Pullman, etc. In history, crises are the events that teach us lessons. We learn from our mistakes, through trial and error. We tried laissez-faire in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. It was not conducive to public peace and tranquility. Sometimes we have to learn "the hard way."
 
 

THE WOBBLIES (IWW)

The union which was labeled and portrayed as the most radical of them all was the International Workers of the World, the IWW. Commonly they were called the "Wobblies." The base or foundation of the IWW was the Western Federation of Miners, organized at Butte, Montana in 1893. In June 1905 this group and many others merged into a new labor federation called the IWW. At their founding convention they issued a radical manifsto, which stated that the IWW must be founded on class struggle, and its general administration must be conducted in harmony with the recognition of the irrespressible conflict between the capitalist class and the working class (Tindall, p. 811).

Like the Knights of Labor, the IWW believed in one big union. Their real base of power was in the West, in Montana, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and so forth, among workers in the mining industry and in the lumber camps. These were rough and tumble workers.

The goal of the IWW was syndicalism. Simply put, syndicalism sought the replacement of government as it is now constituted with a government based on the unions. Today each state or geographic location is represented in Congress. In Europe social classes were represented in the Parliaments, with a House of Commons for the people and a house of Lords for the aristocracy and the great landowners. Syndicalists would replace representation by geographic location or by social class this a government in which everyone was in some sort of union or syndicate, and then the elected representatives of the unions would be the government or Congress.

So there would be the national federation of masons, with a seat or number of seats. The electricians, plumbers, carpenters, bricklayers, teamsters, autoworkers and every profession would have a seat or number of seats. In our time, we might imagine that the Bar Association would have a seat for the legal profession, the AMA would hold a seat for physicians, the ADA would have a seat for the dentists, and so on. Homemakers might have a union and a seat. Here the principle of representation is by profession or type of work. The IWW felt that since the workers do the work, they should make the decisions and decide how the work should be done. Members of the IWW felt that all wealth derived from labor. Therefore government ought to reflect labor. Obviously management disagreed.

The greatest leader of the IWW was William "Big Bill" Haywood. Other leaders of the IWW included Mother Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Joe Hill.

One of the most important successes of the IWW was the great textile strike at Lawrence, Mass. in 1912. (Green, p. 85-86). This began at the American Woolen Company, where half the work force consisted of teenage girls age 14-18. The company cut the pay of the teenage girls, and on Jan. 11, 1912 the Polish girls walked out. Soon the textile workers throughout the town of Lawrence walked out. For two months the strikers battled police, militia and the cold, but in the end they won. The workers received a wage increase, overtime pay and other benefits. The victory at Lawrence marked the IWW at the peak of its strength, with 250,000 members nationwide. But in 1913 the IWW strike of silk workers in Paterson, NJ ended in disaster.

The Wobblies had no hesitancy about using the strike as a weapon, and especially in the West employers feared their alleged fondness for using dynamite. IWW strikes in the West resembled war zones, with pitched gun battles between strikers and the private armies and posses of the companies. Typically the local police or sheriffs, and posses, and the state militia, were brought in on the side of management.

LUDLOW MASSACRE

One of the worst such incidents was the so-called Ludlow Massacre of April 1914. This episode began when coal miners struck in Sept. 1913 against the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, owned by the Rockefeller interests. There was a battle between the strikers and company guards in October, and the governor sent in the state national guard. The strike dragged on, and on April 14, 1914 company guards and the state national guard fired on the strikers and their families. In the confusion two women and 11 children were killed. Their charred bodies were found the next day. This provoked 10 days of warfare between the strikers and the militia, in which 46 more people died. Most of them were company guards. President Woodrow Wilson then sent in the U.S. Army to restore order. The companies re-opened with scab labor, and the workers lost this one.

VIGILANTE VIOLENCE

During World War I the Wobblies opposed American involvement. This made the Wobblies controversial, and unpopular in many circles. After 1916 they became the targets of extra-legal, vigilante violence, and it was "open season" on the IWW. In October 1916, at Everett, Washington, vigilantes murdered a group of Wobblies. Five were killed and 31 wounded. They had been attcked by the sheriff (Donald McRae) and his posse (Dinnerstein, p. 97). This occurred during a strike.

On August 1, 1917, an IWW organizer named Frank Little was lynched at Butte, Montana. He had gone there to support a strike by copper-miners. The owners of the copper mines had denounced the strike as a pro-German uprising. (Dinnerstein, p. 97).

Also in 1917, there was a strike by IWW copper workers in Bisbee. Montana. The companies denounced it as subversion by pro-German elements. In this climate of hysteria a mob of 2000 armed vigilantes seized 1200 strikers and forced them on to cattle cars. They were then taken into the desert in New Mexico and abandoned, without any food, water or shelter. Subsequently they were rescued by the IWW, but the mob would have been happy if they had died. And the public blamed the workers, not the mob.

On Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1919, at Centralia, Washington, a gunbattle erupted between members of the American Legion and the local IWW. The Legionaires attacked the Wobblies, who fired back. Wesley Everest was a member of the IWW and a war veteran himself. After the altercation he was taken to jail. That night a mob broke into the jail and abducted him. He was castrated and lynched. (Dinnerstein, p. 97).

GOVERNMENT REPRESSION

In Sept. 1917 the federal government ordered the arrest of the IWW leaders all over the country on charges of interfering with the war effort (Dinnerstein, p. 98). In 1921, while out on bail, Big Bill Haywood fled to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1928. Half of his ashed were sent back to Chicago. The other half were buried in the Kremlin wall.

By 1924 the IWW had been virtually destroyed.

The leading work on the IWW is We Shall Be All, by Melvyn Dubofsky.
 
 

ILGWA AND WTUL

So far most of my comments have been about men. However women played a prominent role in the textile and garment industry. In New York City in 1909 there were 20,000 employed in the shirtwaist industry alone. In Sept. 1909 workers at the Leiserson Company and the Triangle Shirtwaist Company went out on strike. The owners of the companies hired thugs to attack and beat the pickets. On Nov. 22 a meeting was called to consider a general strike by all of the shirtwaist workers throughout New York. But there was reluctance. After two hours of debate a woman named Clara Lemlich rose to speak. She was a Jewish immigrant. (Green, p. 71-73). She described how she had been beaten on the picket line, and repeated the call for a general strike. The audience agreed, and took the Jewish oath, swearing that they would sooner see their arm wither than to give up the strike. The International Lady Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the United Hebrew Trades, the Women Trade Union League and the Socialist Party supported the strike, and they shut the New York garment industry down. It spread to garment factories in New Jersey and Philadelphia.

In Feb. of 1910 the women won, and all but 19 of the 337 shirtwaist companies in New York and Phila. negotiated contracts with the ILGWU. The strike of 1909-1910 converted the ILGWU into a powerful union, and launched the careers of Clara Lemlich and Pauline Newman.

Another important women's union in this period was the Women's Trade Union League, or WTUL, headed by Rose Schneiderman. She had been born in Russian Poland, and was a capmaker.
 
 

THE TRIANGLE FIRE

Another very important event in labor history is the famous, infamous Triangle Fire. This occurred in New York City on March 25, 1911. (Green, P. 74). Most of the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company were women. The factory was a ten-story building. 146 workers, most of them women, died in the fire. They were trapped on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the building. There were not adequate fire escapes and exits. Some doors were locked. To escape the fire, the women jumped from the upper stories of the building. Some deaths resulted from jumping, others from smoke inhalation and being burned for those who did not jump. Eyewitness accounts describe the sidewalk littered with the bodies of the victims, and the streets flowing with the blood of the victims as it was washed away by the fire hoses. It was one of the most tragic episodes in American labor history. A few days later 80,000 people marched in a silent vigil to mourn the victims. It is also the case that many of the employees of the factory were Jewish immigrants. This episode demonstrated the need for stricter building codes and legislation requiring factory inspection.

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If I might digress, several years ago there was another tragedy at a chicken processing plant in South Carolina. Something like 25 people died in that fire. Some of the doors had been locked, apparently to prevent the workers from loafing or taking unauthorized breaks. Conditions in factories are better than they were 80 years ago, but even today tragedies can still happen.

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LABOR EVENTUALLY ACHIEVES ITS GOALS

In time, in the New Deal of the 1930s, the right to strike and to form unions and bargain collectively would be acknowledged and enforced. Of course today that right is being eroded by legislation from the Reagan-Bush years legalizing replacement workers.

The labor movement sought to use its own power, the power of the strike, the power to withhold its labor, to force employers to accept unions and collective bargaining and the 8-hour day. But in the 1930s, it was, in part, a third party, the power of government, that changed the laws and imposed these concessions on business. It was in part by:

(1) getting public opinion on its side, and

(2) building a public consensus, and

(3) changing the consciousness of the people,

that labor won the successes it did in the 1930s and 1940s. Labor won these successes not only from its own strength, but by getting the crucial support of a third party. That party was public opinion, and government, using the power of the state.

HENRY FORD AND THE ASSEMBLY LINE REVOLUTION

Finally, as we approach the era of World War I, let me shift gears a little, away from the labor movement per se and mention another critical event of the World War I era. While the Wobblies and the Socialists sought to organize the working class, Henry Ford was working on a revolution of his own. It was called the assembly line.

Henry Ford established the Ford Motor Company in 1903, and in 1908 began producing the Model T (Tin Lizzie). By 1914 a union was trying to consolidate its position at Ford's plant. On Jan. 5, 1914 Ford announced the Five Dollar Day. This was an unheard of sum in 1914. In a stroke, he doubled the wage for common labor, and reduced the work day from 9 hours to 8 hours. He also established a personnel office to place workers in jobs that matched their skills. The next day 10,000 applicants stood outside the gates of his plant at Highland Park, Michigan. Ford had the pick of the workers. At Ford the IWW collapsed. (America Past And Present, Divine, Breen, Fredrickson and Williams, p. 665). In exchange for his wage increase, Ford demanded that the workers agree that he could upgrade his assembly line and speed it up. Using overhead pulleys, he installed a conveyor belt that moved. The worker stood in one place, and the conveyor belt moved the assembly line along. It was a moving assembly line.

Turnover and absenteeism declined substantially under the new regime (10% to .3%). Output increased dramatically.(ibid) In 1914 he sold 248,000 Fords. The price of a Ford automobile dropped from $850 in 1908 to $290 in 1924. The vast increase in productivity and profits more than compensated for the wage increase. In 1919 Ford was even able to go to a $6 day. In the Twenties Ford electrified his plants. By 1924 there were 42,000 workers at the Highland Park facility, and in 1925 Ford turned out 31,200 cars with the same machinery used to produce 25,000 in 1920.

If we look at manufacturing as a whole in the ten year period 1919-1929, the number of wage earners decreased slightly (Green, p. 108). But by 1929 70% of American industry had electrified. With about the same number of workers, American industrial productivity increased on average by 64%. To put it differently, the same number of workers were producing twice as much. (Green, p. 110-111). During the Twenties productivity at Ford increased 255%. The workers got a 26% increase in real wages. But with this enormous productivity Ford could easily afford to raise the wages of his workers. In the Twenties Ford dividends jumped 100%. (Green, p. 111). Ford had understood that a vast increase in productivity and profits would more than pay for a small increase in wages. Ford was the pioneer in the "continuous flow," assembly line/mass production revolution.