Description
CRISIS IN THE 1970S, REPUBLICAN RESURGENCE, AND INTO THE 21ST CENTURY
Case Assignment
Watergate
Write a 3- to 4-page essay addressing the topic below. Make sure that you look beyond the Required Materials to find additional sources for your paper.
Discuss the basic events of Watergate and its larger significance including the effects on America.
Assignment Expectations
Use concepts from the background readings as well as any academic resources you can find (Wikipedia-type sources are not acceptable). Please be sure to cite your sources within the text and provide a reference page at the end of your paper.
Length: 3 to 4 pages, double-spaced and typed using 12 Point Times New Roman font.
The following items will be assessed in particular:
Your ability to apply the basic concepts to the questions.
Some in-text references to the background readings (APA formatting not required).
The essay should address each element of the assignment. Remember to support your answers with solid references including the background readings.
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T h e A m e r i c a n Y aw p
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
The
A meric a n
Y aw p
A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook
v ol . 2 : si n c e 1 8 7 7
e di t e d by jose ph l . l ock e a n d be n w r igh t
sta n f or d u n i v e r si t y pr e s s
•
sta n f or d, c a l i f or n i a
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Locke, Joseph L., editor. | Wright, Ben, editor.
Title: The American yawp : a massively collaborative open U.S. history textbook /
edited by Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018015206 (print) | LCCN 2018017638 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781503608139 (e-book) | ISBN 9781503606715 | ISBN 9781503606715
(v. 1 :pbk. :alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503606883(v. 2 :pbk. :alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781503608139(v. 1 :ebook) | ISBN 9781503608146(v. 2 :ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—Textbooks.
Classification: LCC E178.1 (ebook) | LCC E178.1 .A493673 2019 (print) |
DDC 973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015206
Bruce Lundquist
Typeset by Newgen in Sabon LT 11/15
Cover illustration: Detail from “Victory!” by M.F. Tobin, ca. 1884. Source: Susan H.
Douglas Political Americana Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections,
Cornell University Library.
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
Yawp yôp n: 1: a raucous noise 2: rough vigorous language
“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
Walt Whitman, 1854
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
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© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
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Contents
Prefaceix
16. Capital and Labor
1
17. Conquering the West
28
18. Life in Industrial America
56
19. American Empire
82
20. The Progressive Era
109
21. World War I and Its Aftermath
140
22. The New Era
163
23. The Great Depression
192
24. World War II
225
25. The Cold War
257
26. The Affluent Society
288
27. The Sixties
314
28. The Unraveling
343
29. The Triumph of the Right
376
30. The Recent Past
411
Contributors441
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© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
Preface
We are the heirs of our history. Our communities, our politics, our culture: it is all a product of the past. As William Faulkner wrote, “The past
is never dead. It’s not even past.”1 To understand who we are, we must
therefore understand our history.
But what is history? What does it mean to study the past? History
can never be the simple memorizing of names and dates (how would we
even know what names and dates are worth studying?). It is too complex a task and too dynamic a process to be reduced to that. It must be
something more because, in a sense, it is we who give life to the past.
Historians ask historical questions, weigh evidence from primary sources
(material produced in the era under study), grapple with rival interpretations, and argue for their conclusions. History, then, is our ongoing
conversation about the past.
Every generation must write its own history. Old conclusions—say,
about the motives of European explorers or the realities of life on slave
plantations—fall before new evidence and new outlooks. Names of
Civil rights march
from Selma to
Montgomery,
Alabama, in
1965. Library of
Congress.
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xP r ef ace
leaders and dates of events may not change, but the weight we give them
and the context with which we frame them invariably evolves. History is
a conversation between the past and the present. To understand a global
society, we must explore a history of transnational forces. To understand
the lived experiences of ordinary Americans, we must look beyond the
elites who framed older textbooks and listen to the poor and disadvantaged from all generations.
But why study history in the first place? History can cultivate essential
and relevant—or, in more utilitarian terms, “marketable”—skills: careful
reading, creative thinking, and clear communication. Many are familiar
with a famous quote of philosopher George Santayana: “Those who fail
to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”2 The role of history in
shaping current events is more complicated than this quote implies, but
Santayana was right in arguing that history offers important lessons. The
historical sensibility yields perspective and context and broader awareness. It liberates us from our narrow experiences and pulls us into, in the
words of historian Peter Stearns, “the laboratory of human experience.”3
Perhaps a better way to articulate the importance of studying history
would be, “Those who fail to understand their history will fail to understand themselves.”
Historical interpretation is never wholly subjective: it requires method,
rigor, and perspective. The open nature of historical discourse does not
mean that all arguments—and certainly not all “opinions”—about the
past are equally valid. Some are simply wrong. And yet good historical
questions will not always have easy answers. Asking “When did Christopher Columbus first sail across the Atlantic?” will tell us far less than
“What inspired Columbus to attempt his voyage?” or “How did Native
Americans interpret the arrival of Europeans?” Crafting answers to these
questions reveals far greater insights into our history.
But how can any textbook encapsulate American history? Should it
organize around certain themes or surrender to the impossibility of synthesis and retreat toward generality? In the oft-cited lines of the American poet Walt Whitman, we found as good an organizing principle as any
other: “I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable,” he wrote,
“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”4 Long before
Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively
amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. Here we find
both chorus and cacophony together, as one. This textbook therefore
offers the story of that barbaric, untranslatable American yawp by con-
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
P re f a c e x i
structing a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent
historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers
narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural
creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets,
congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity
wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like
ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that can strangle narratives of
American history.
We have produced The American Yawp to help guide students in their
encounter with American history. The American Yawp is a collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for general readers
and college-level history courses. Over three hundred academic historians—scholars and experienced college-level instructors—have come
together and freely volunteered their expertise to help democratize the
American past for twenty-first century readers. The project is freely accessible online at www.AmericanYawp.com, and in addition to providing
a peer review of the text, Stanford University Press has partnered with
The American Yawp to publish a low-cost print edition. Furthermore,
The American Yawp remains an evolving, collaborative text: you are encouraged to help us improve by offering comments on our feedback page,
available through AmericanYawp.com.
The American Yawp is a fully open resource: you are encouraged to
use it, download it, distribute it, and modify it as you see fit. The project
is formally operated under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
4.0 International (CC-BY-SA) License and is designed to meet the standards of a “Free Cultural Work.” We are happy to share it and we hope
you will do the same.
Joseph Locke & Ben Wright, editors
N o t e s t o p r e fac e
1. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House,
1954), 73.
2. George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Or the Phases of Human Progress,
Volume I (New York: Scribner, 1905), 284.
3. Peter N. Stearns, “Why Study History,” American Historical Association (July 11, 2008). https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha
-history-and-archives/archives/why-study-history-(1998.
4. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn: Rome, 1855), 55.
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© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
T h e A m e r i c a n Y aw p
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
16
Capital and Labor
I. Introduction
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 heralded a new era of labor conflict in the United States. That year, mired in the stagnant economy that
followed the bursting of the railroads’ financial bubble in 1873, rail
lines slashed workers’ wages (even, workers complained, as they reaped
enormous government subsidies and paid shareholders lucrative stock
dividends). Workers struck from Baltimore to St. Louis, shutting down
railroad traffic—the nation’s economic lifeblood—across the country.
Panicked business leaders and friendly political officials reacted
quickly. When local police forces would not or could not suppress the
strikes, governors called out state militias to break them and restore rail
service. Many strikers destroyed rail property rather than allow militias
to reopen the rails. The protests approached a class war. The governor of
A Maryland National Guard unit
fires on strikers
during the Great
Railroad Strike of
1877. Harper’s
Weekly, via
Wikimedia.
Maryland deployed the state’s militia. In Baltimore, the militia fired into
a crowd of striking workers, killing eleven and wounding many more.
Strikes convulsed towns and cities across Pennsylvania. The head of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas Andrew Scott, suggested that if workers
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2 chapter 16
were unhappy with their wages, they should be given “a rifle diet for a
few days and see how they like that kind of bread.”1 Law enforcement in
Pittsburgh refused to put down the protests, so the governor called out
the state militia, who killed twenty strikers with bayonets and rifle fire. A
month of chaos erupted. Strikers set fire to the city, destroying dozens of
buildings, over a hundred engines, and over a thousand cars. In Reading,
strikers destroyed rail property and an angry crowd bombarded militiamen with rocks and bottles. The militia fired into the crowd, killing ten.
A general strike erupted in St. Louis, and strikers seized rail depots and
declared for the eight-hour day and the abolition of child labor. Federal
troops and vigilantes fought their way into the depot, killing eighteen and
breaking the strike. Rail lines were shut down all across neighboring Illinois, where coal miners struck in sympathy, tens of thousands gathered
to protest under the aegis of the Workingmen’s Party, and twenty protesters were killed in Chicago by special police and militiamen.
Courts, police, and state militias suppressed the strikes, but it was
federal troops that finally defeated them. When Pennsylvania militiamen
were unable to contain the strikes, federal troops stepped in. When militia in West Virginia refused to break the strike, federal troops broke it
instead. On the orders of the president, American soldiers were deployed
all across northern rail lines. Soldiers moved from town to town, suppressing protests and reopening rail lines. Six weeks after it had begun,
the strike had been crushed. Nearly 100 Americans died in “The Great
Upheaval.” Workers destroyed nearly $40 million worth of property. The
strike galvanized the country. It convinced laborers of the need for institutionalized unions, persuaded businesses of the need for even greater
political influence and government aid, and foretold a half century of
labor conflict in the United States.2
II. The March of Capital
Growing labor unrest accompanied industrialization. The greatest strikes
first hit the railroads only because no other industry had so effectively
marshaled together capital, government support, and bureaucratic management. Many workers perceived their new powerlessness in the coming industrial order. Skills mattered less and less in an industrialized,
mass-producing economy, and their strength as individuals seemed ever
smaller and more insignificant when companies grew in size and power
and managers grew flush with wealth and influence. Long hours, dangerous working conditions, and the difficulty of supporting a family on
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C a p i t a l a n d L a bo r 3
meager and unpredictable wages compelled armies of labor to organize
and battle against the power of capital.
The post–Civil War era saw revolutions in American industry. Technological innovations and national investments slashed the costs of production and distribution. New administrative frameworks sustained the
weight of vast firms. National credit agencies eased the uncertainties
surrounding rapid movement of capital between investors, manufacturers, and retailers. Plummeting transportation and communication costs
opened new national media, which advertising agencies used to nationalize various products.
By the turn of the century, corporate leaders and wealthy industrialists embraced the new principles of scientific management, or Taylorism,
after its noted proponent, Frederick Taylor. The precision of steel parts,
the harnessing of electricity, the innovations of machine tools, and the
mass markets wrought by the railroads offered new avenues for efficiency. To match the demands of the machine age, Taylor said, firms
needed a scientific organization of production. He urged all manufacturers to increase efficiency by subdividing tasks. Rather than having thirty
mechanics individually making thirty machines, for instance, a manufacturer could assign thirty laborers to perform thirty distinct tasks. Such a
shift would not only make workers as interchangeable as the parts they
were using, it would also dramatically speed up the process of production. If managed by trained experts, specific tasks could be done quicker
John Pierpont
Morgan with
two friends, c.
1907. Library of
Congress.
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4 chapter 16
Glazier Stove
Company
moulding room,
Chelsea, Michigan,
c. 1900–1910. Library of Congress.
and more efficiently. Taylorism increased the scale and scope of manufacturing and allowed for the flowering of mass production. Building on the
use of interchangeable parts in Civil War–era weapons manufacturing,
American firms advanced mass production techniques and technologies.
Singer sewing machines, Chicago packers’ “disassembly” lines, McCormick grain reapers, Duke cigarette rollers: all realized unprecedented efficiencies and achieved unheard-of levels of production that propelled their
companies into the forefront of American business. Henry Ford made the
assembly line famous, allowing the production of automobiles to skyrocket as their cost plummeted, but various American firms had been
paving the way for decades.3
Cyrus McCormick had overseen the construction of mechanical reapers (used for harvesting wheat) for decades. He had relied on skilled
blacksmiths, skilled machinists, and skilled woodworkers to handcraft
horse-drawn machines. But production was slow and the machines were
expensive. The reapers still enabled massive efficiency gains in grain
farming, but their high cost and slow production times put them out of
reach of most American wheat farmers. But then, in 1880, McCormick
hired a production manager who had overseen the manufacturing of Colt
firearms to transform his system of production. The Chicago plant introduced new jigs, steel gauges, and pattern machines that could make
precise duplicates of new, interchangeable parts. The company had produced twenty-one thousand machines in 1880. It made twice as many in
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C a p i t a l a n d L a bo r 5
1885, and by 1889, less than a decade later, it was producing over one
hundred thousand a year.4
Industrialization and mass production pushed the United States into
the forefront of the world. The American economy had lagged behind
Britain, Germany, and France as recently as the 1860s, but by 1900 the
United States was the world’s leading manufacturing nation. Thirteen
years later, by 1913, the United States produced one third of the world’s
industrial output—more than Britain, France, and Germany combined.5
Firms such as McCormick’s realized massive economies of scale: after
accounting for their initial massive investments in machines and marketing, each additional product lost the company relatively little in production costs. The bigger the production, then, the bigger the profits.
New industrial companies therefore hungered for markets to keep their
high-volume production facilities operating. Retailers and advertisers
sustained the massive markets needed for mass production, and corporate bureaucracies meanwhile allowed for the management of giant new
firms. A new class of managers—comprising what one prominent economic historian called the “visible hand”—operated between the worlds
of workers and owners and ensured the efficient operation and administration of mass production and mass distribution. Even more important
to the growth and maintenance of these new companies, however, were
the legal creations used to protect investors and sustain the power of
massed capital.6
The costs of mass production were prohibitive for all but the very
wealthiest individuals, and, even then, the risks would be too great to
bear individually. The corporation itself was ages old, but the actual right
to incorporate had generally been reserved for public works projects or
government-sponsored monopolies. After the Civil War, however, the
corporation, using new state incorporation laws passed during the Market Revolution of the early nineteenth century, became a legal mechanism for nearly any enterprise to marshal vast amounts of capital while
limiting the liability of shareholders. By washing their hands of legal and
financial obligations while still retaining the right to profit massively,
investors flooded corporations with the capital needed to industrialize.
But a competitive marketplace threatened the promise of investments.
Once the efficiency gains of mass production were realized, profit margins could be undone by cutthroat competition, which kept costs low as
price cutting sank into profits. Companies rose and fell—and investors
suffered losses—as manufacturing firms struggled to maintain supremacy
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6 chapter 16
in their particular industries. Economies of scale were a double-edged
sword: while additional production provided immense profits, the high
fixed costs of operating expensive factories dictated that even modest
losses from selling underpriced goods were preferable to not selling profitably priced goods at all. And as market share was won and lost, profits
proved unstable. American industrial firms tried everything to avoid competition: they formed informal pools and trusts, they entered price-fixing
agreements, they divided markets, and, when blocked by antitrust laws
and renegade price cutting, merged into consolidations. Rather than suffer from ruinous competition, firms combined and bypassed it altogether.
Between 1895 and 1904, and particularly in the four years between
1898 and 1902, a wave of mergers rocked the American economy. Competition melted away in what is known as “the great merger movement.”
In nine years, four thousand companies—nearly 20 percent of the American economy—were folded into rival firms. In nearly every major industry, newly consolidated firms such as General Electric and DuPont
utterly dominated their market. Forty-one separate consolidations each
controlled over 70 percent of the market in their respective industries. In
1901, financier J. P. Morgan oversaw the formation of United States Steel,
built from eight leading steel companies. Industrialization was built on
steel, and one firm—the world’s first billion-dollar company—controlled
the market. Monopoly had arrived.7
III. The Rise of Inequality
Industrial capitalism realized the greatest advances in efficiency and productivity that the world had ever seen. Massive new companies marshaled capital on an unprecedented scale and provided enormous profits
that created unheard-of fortunes. But it also created millions of low-paid,
unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working conditions. Industrial capitalism confronted Gilded Age Americans with unprecedented inequalities. The sudden appearance of the extreme wealth
of industrial and financial leaders alongside the crippling squalor of the
urban and rural poor shocked Americans. “This association of poverty
with progress is the great enigma of our times,” economist Henry George
wrote in his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty.8
The great financial and industrial titans, the so-called robber barons,
including railroad operators such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, oilmen such
as J. D. Rockefeller, steel magnates such as Andrew Carnegie, and bank-
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C a p i t a l a n d L a bo r 7
ers such as J. P. Morgan, won fortunes that, adjusted for inflation, are
still among the largest the nation has ever seen. According to various
measurements, in 1890 the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned one
fourth of the nation’s assets; the top 10 percent owned over 70 percent.
And inequality only accelerated. By 1900, the richest 10 percent controlled perhaps 90 percent of the nation’s wealth.9
As these vast and unprecedented new fortunes accumulated among
a small number of wealthy Americans, new ideas arose to bestow moral
legitimacy upon them. In 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution through natural selection in his On the
Origin of Species. It was not until the 1870s, however, that those theories gained widespread traction among biologists, naturalists, and other
scientists in the United States and, in turn, challenged the social, political, and religious beliefs of many Americans. One of Darwin’s greatest
popularizers, the British sociologist and biologist Herbert Spencer, applied Darwin’s theories to society and popularized the phrase survival
of the fittest. The fittest, Spencer said, would demonstrate their superiority through economic success, while state welfare and private charity
would lead to social degeneration—it would encourage the survival of
the weak.10
“There must be complete surrender to the law of natural selection,”
the Baltimore Sun journalist H. L. Mencken wrote in 1907. “All growth
must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may
Vanderbilt
mansion, The
Breakers. Newport, Rhode
Island, c. 1904.
Library of
Congress.
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8 chapter 16
“Five Cents a
Spot”: unauthorized immigrant
lodgings in a
Bayard Street tenement. New York
City, c. 1890. Library of Congress.
do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to uplift the
weak.”11 By the time Mencken wrote those words, the ideas of social
Darwinism had spread among wealthy Americans and their defenders.
Social Darwinism identified a natural order that extended from the laws
of the cosmos to the workings of industrial society. All species and all
societies, including modern humans, the theory went, were governed by
a relentless competitive struggle for survival. The inequality of outcomes
was to be not merely tolerated but encouraged and celebrated. It signified
the progress of species and societies. Spencer’s major work, Synthetic Philosophy, sold nearly four hundred thousand copies in the United States
by the time of his death in 1903. Gilded Age industrial elites, such as steel
magnate Andrew Carnegie, inventor Thomas Edison, and Standard Oil’s
John D. Rockefeller, were among Spencer’s prominent followers. Other
American thinkers, such as Yale’s William Graham Sumner, echoed his
ideas. Sumner said, “Before the tribunal of nature a man has no more
right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any
wild beast; his right to pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to
maintain the struggle for existence.”12
But not all so eagerly welcomed inequalities. The spectacular growth
of the U.S. economy and the ensuing inequalities in living conditions and
incomes confounded many Americans. But as industrial capitalism overtook the nation, it achieved political protections. Although both major
political parties facilitated the rise of big business and used state power to
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C a p i t a l a n d L a bo r 9
support the interests of capital against labor, big business looked primarily to the Republican Party.
The Republican Party had risen as an antislavery faction committed
to “free labor,” but it was also an ardent supporter of American business.
Abraham Lincoln had been a corporate lawyer who defended railroads,
and during the Civil War the Republican national government took advantage of the wartime absence of southern Democrats to push through a
pro-business agenda. The Republican congress gave millions of acres and
dollars to railroad companies. Republicans became the party of business,
and they dominated American politics throughout the Gilded Age and
the first several decades of the twentieth century. Of the sixteen presidential elections between the Civil War and the Great Depression, Republican candidates won all but four. Republicans controlled the Senate in
twenty-seven out of thirty-two sessions in the same period. Republican
dominance maintained a high protective tariff, an import tax designed
to shield American businesses from foreign competition; southern planters had vehemently opposed this policy before the war but now could
do nothing to prevent. It provided the protective foundation for a new
American industrial order, while Spencer’s social Darwinism provided
moral justification for national policies that minimized government interference in the economy for anything other than the protection and
support of business.
IV. The Labor Movement
The ideas of social Darwinism attracted little support among the mass
of American industrial laborers. American workers toiled in difficult
jobs for long hours and little pay. Mechanization and mass production
threw skilled laborers into unskilled positions. Industrial work ebbed and
flowed with the economy. The typical industrial laborer could expect to
be unemployed one month out of the year. They labored sixty hours a
week and could still expect their annual income to fall below the poverty
line. Among the working poor, wives and children were forced into the
labor market to compensate. Crowded cities, meanwhile, failed to accommodate growing urban populations and skyrocketing rents trapped
families in crowded slums.
Strikes ruptured American industry throughout the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Workers seeking higher wages, shorter hours,
and safer working conditions had struck throughout the a ntebellum era,
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1 0 chapter 16
The Lawrence
textile strike,
1912. Library of
Congress.
but organized unions were fleeting and transitory. The Civil War and
Reconstruction seemed to briefly distract the nation from the plight of
labor, but the end of the sectional crisis and the explosive growth of big
business, unprecedented fortunes, and a vast industrial workforce in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century sparked the rise of a vast American
labor movement.
The failure of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 convinced workers
of the need to organize. Union memberships began to climb. The Knights
of Labor enjoyed considerable success in the early 1880s, due in part to
its efforts to unite skilled and unskilled workers. It welcomed all laborers, including women (the Knights only barred lawyers, bankers, and
liquor dealers). By 1886, the Knights had over seven hundred thousand
members. The Knights envisioned a cooperative producer-centered society that rewarded labor, not capital, but, despite their sweeping vision,
the Knights focused on practical gains that could be won through the
organization of workers into local unions.13
In Marshall, Texas, in the spring of 1886, one of Jay Gould’s rail companies fired a Knights of Labor member for attending a union meeting. His
local union walked off the job, and soon others joined. From Texas and
Arkansas into Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois, nearly two hundred thousand workers struck against Gould’s rail lines. Gould hired strikebreakers
and the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a kind of private security contractor,
to suppress the strikes and get the rails moving again. Political leaders
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C a p i t a l a n d L a bo r 11
An 1892 cover of Harper’s Weekly depicted
Pinkerton detectives, who had surrendered to
steel mill workers during the Homestead Strike,
navigating a gauntlet of violent strikers. Library
of Congress.
helped him, and state militias were called in support of Gould’s companies. The Texas governor called out the Texas Rangers. Workers countered by destroying property, only winning them negative headlines and
for many justifying the use of strikebreakers and militiamen. The strike
broke, briefly undermining the Knights of Labor, but the organization regrouped and set its eyes on a national campaign for the eight-hour day.14
In the summer of 1886, the campaign for an eight-hour day, long
a rallying cry that united American laborers, culminated in a national
strike on May 1, 1886. Somewhere between three hundred thousand and
five hundred thousand workers struck across the country.
In Chicago, police forces killed several workers while breaking up
protesters at the McCormick reaper works. Labor leaders and radicals
called for a protest at Haymarket S
