Labor in the Gilded Age in two minutes
- Most workers put in ten-hour days, six days a week. Real wages rose, but depressions brought wage cuts, and by 1900 nearly one in five children aged 10 to 15 worked.
- In July 1877 a wage cut on the Baltimore and Ohio sparked the Great Railroad Strike, which spread across the country, and President Hayes sent federal troops; about 100 people died.
- The Knights of Labor, led by Terence Powderly, welcomed skilled and unskilled workers, women, and Black workers (but not Chinese workers), and reached about 700,000 members by mid-1886.
- After a bomb killed police at Haymarket on May 4, 1886, the Knights fell to about 100,000 members by 1890, while Gompers's craft-based AFL (1886) bargained for wages and hours.
- At Homestead in 1892 Carnegie Steel locked out its union, Pinkerton guards and workers fought, state militia reopened the mill, and the union lost its hold for decades.
- In 1894 the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, boycotted Pullman cars; a federal injunction and troops ended the strike, and In re Debs (1895) upheld the injunction.
- On the exam: questions ask why unions struggled, how employers and government beat strikes, and how the Knights and the AFL differed; it links to the Progressive Era and the New Deal.
Topic 6.7 key terms
- Pinkertons
Armed guards and detectives from a private agency that companies hired to protect property and break strikes.
- Lockout
An employer shuts workers out of the workplace to force them to accept terms, or to break their union.
- Homestead Strike (1892)
The 1892 lockout and strike at Carnegie Steel's Homestead, Pennsylvania mill. A battle between workers and hired Pinkerton guards made it one of the most famous clashes between labor and management of the Gilded Age.
- Wage earner
A worker paid wages by an employer, by the hour, day or piece, instead of working for themselves. By 1900, about two of every three employed Americans.
- Real wages
Wages measured by what they can buy. When prices fall while pay holds steady, real wages rise, even if the paycheck looks the same.
- Standard of living
How well people live, judged by what their income buys: food, clothing, housing, goods. It rose for many Americans in these years, while the gap between rich and poor grew.
- Child labor
Regular paid work by children, common in mines, mills and factories. Its numbers and share rose after 1870; by 1900 about 1.75 million children aged 10–15 were at work.
- Panic of 1873
A banking collapse that set off a depression lasting more than five years. Jay Cooke's bank failed after lending too much to build the Northern Pacific Railroad. Factories closed, and many railroads went bankrupt.
- Great Railroad Strike of 1877
The first nationwide strike. It began when Baltimore and Ohio crews walked out over a wage cut. Other workers joined them, and federal troops helped end it.
- State militia
Part-time citizen soldiers under a governor's command. In 1877, governors sent militia against strikers. If the militia couldn't or wouldn't act, a governor could ask the president for federal troops.
- Federal troops
U.S. Army soldiers under the president's command. In 1877, governors asked for help, and Hayes sent troops to several states, including West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. It was the first time since the 1830s that a president used federal troops to end a labor dispute.
- National Labor Union (1866)
The first national labor federation. It won an eight-hour day for federal workers in 1868, then faded away in the depression that began in 1873.
- Colored National Labor Union (1869)
A national labor organization formed by Black workers in 1869 because most white unions would not admit them. Isaac Myers of Baltimore was its president.
- Knights of Labor
A national union, secret until 1881, that welcomed almost anyone who worked, skilled or not. It wanted cooperatives, an eight-hour day, and arbitration instead of strikes.
- Craft union
A union of skilled workers in one trade, like cigar makers or carpenters. Members paid high dues that funded strike pay and benefits.
- Anarchism
The belief that all government should be abolished. Some Chicago anarchists, many of them German and Czech immigrants, called for revolution, even by force.
- Haymarket affair (1886)
A bomb thrown at a Chicago labor rally killed police officers and others. Eight anarchist leaders were convicted, though the bomb thrower was never identified.
- American Federation of Labor (AFL)
A federation of craft unions founded in 1886. It organized skilled workers trade by trade and focused on wages, hours and working conditions.
- Collective bargaining
Workers negotiating with an employer as one group, through their union, over wages, hours and working conditions.
- Las Gorras Blancas
The "White Caps": Hispano villagers in New Mexico who, around 1889–1891, cut fences and burned railroad ties to stop land companies from closing off common lands.
- Strikebreakers
Workers hired to take the jobs of strikers so a company can keep running through a strike.
- Panic of 1893
A financial crash that began in 1893 and set off a depression. Banks and railroads failed, factories cut wages or closed, and millions of Americans lost their jobs.
- American Railway Union
An industrial union: one union for every kind of railroad worker, skilled or not. By its own 1894 vote, white workers only.
- Boycott
Refusing to buy, handle or work with a company's goods or services, as a way to pressure it. Here, ARU members refused to switch or move trains that carried Pullman cars.
- Injunction
A court order to stop doing something. After 1894, employers used injunctions to break strikes.
- In re Debs (1895)
The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the injunction against the Pullman boycott, on the federal government's power over interstate commerce and the mails.
- Laissez-faire
The idea that government should leave the economy alone. Even so, judges and troops protected employers' property and contracts, which in a strike usually meant siding with the employer.
- Argumentation (AP skill 6.C)
Explain how pieces of evidence relate to each other: which one supports another, which one complicates it. Words like because, but, while and so do that work.
- Progressive Era
Roughly 1890–1920, when reformers pushed government to deal with the problems of industrial life: unsafe work, child labor, powerful corporations, crowded cities.
- Fair Labor Standards Act (1938)
The federal law that set a national minimum wage, required overtime pay after 40 hours a week (phased in by 1940), and limited child labor.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
The Barges
July 6, 1892
Key terms: Pinkertons, Lockout, Homestead Strike (1892)
Before dawn on July 6, 1892, a tugboat called the Little Bill towed two barges up the Monongahela River.
On board were about three hundred guards from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, and crates of rifles.
Upriver, the stacks of Andrew Carnegie's Homestead steel works were cold. The company had locked its workers out. The whole town had been watching the river all night.
Prices had been falling for twenty years, so a day's pay bought more than ever.
Yet in those same years, workers and owners fought pitched battles all over the country. What did workers want that badly?
A Day's Work
1870–1900
Key terms: Wage earner, Real wages, Standard of living, Child labor
By 1900, two out of three working Americans worked for wages. Most put in ten hours a day, six days a week. In the steel mills, twelve.
A shoemaker used to make a whole shoe. In a factory, a worker might make one cut, all day, at the machine's pace.
Prices fell for most of thirty years. So the same paycheck bought more. Factory workers' real wages rose by about half between 1860 and 1890.
Catalogues like Montgomery Ward's mailed ready-made clothes and sewing machines to farm towns. Many families lived better than their parents had.
But averages hid the bad years. After 1873 and 1893, depressions meant wage cuts and layoffs. No unemployment pay. No pension. No pay at all if a machine took your hand.
One paycheck often wasn't enough, so children worked too. By 1900, nearly one child in five between ten and fifteen was at work.
The gap between rich and poor grew too. In 1896, one economist figured the richest one percent of families owned more than the other ninety-nine.
So workers were better off, on average. Nobody lives on an average.
The Summer the Trains Stopped
1873–1877
Key terms: Panic of 1873, Great Railroad Strike of 1877, State militia, Federal troops
In September 1873, Jay Cooke and Company, the bank that sold the Union's war bonds, went under. The depression that followed lasted more than five years.
In July 1877, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages by ten percent. At Martinsburg, West Virginia, the train crews stopped the trains.
In ten days, the strike ran down the rails to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Chicago and St. Louis. No national union called it, but workers in other trades joined in.
In Pittsburgh, militia brought in from Philadelphia fired into a crowd. About twenty people died, including a woman and three children.
That night, crowds burned the Pennsylvania Railroad's yards: 104 locomotives and well over a thousand cars.
In April, President Hayes had pulled federal troops out of the last Southern statehouses, ending Reconstruction. In July, he sent the army to the railyards.
By the time it ended, about a hundred people were dead.
The strikers lost. But they had shown they could stop the country. Next time, they meant to be organized first.
One Big Union
1866–1886
Key terms: National Labor Union (1866), Colored National Labor Union (1869), Knights of Labor, Craft union
Workers put what they wanted into a song.
Singer
We mean to make things over, we are tired of toil for naught, With but bare enough to live upon, and never an hour for thought; We want to feel the sunshine, and we want to smell the flowers…
Most worked ten or twelve hours. Eight would take a movement.
The National Labor Union, founded in 1866, got Congress to give federal workers an eight-hour day. Then the depression of 1873 finished it.
Most white unions shut Black workers out. In 1865, white caulkers struck to drive Black caulkers from Baltimore's shipyards. Isaac Myers and other Black caulkers bought a shipyard. In 1869, Black workers formed their own national union.
The Knights of Labor began in 1869 as a secret society of Philadelphia garment cutters. Newspapers printed their name as five stars.
In 1881, under Terence Powderly, the Knights went public. They welcomed skilled and unskilled, women and men, Black and white. Their goals: eight hours, equal pay for women, no child labor, and worker-owned cooperatives.
By mid-1886, the Knights of Labor had about seven hundred thousand members.
Skilled craftsmen built a different kind of union: one trade at a time, high dues, big strike funds, hard bargaining.
New York, April 1886. Two doors on one street, and four people who want to join a union.
The Knights took nearly everyone who worked. The craft unions asked one question first: what's your trade?
Neither door opened for Chinese workers. The Knights lobbied for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That spring, members of both kinds of union made the same demand, on the same day.
For What We Will
May 1886 – 1887
Key terms: Anarchism, Haymarket affair (1886), American Federation of Labor (AFL), Collective bargaining, Las Gorras Blancas
On May 1, 1886, some 340,000 workers across the country rallied or struck for the eight-hour day. Chicago was the center. Tens of thousands marched, singing.
On May 3, police fired on strikers outside the McCormick reaper works. At least two died. The next night, anarchists called a protest at the Haymarket.
The first handbill told workers to come armed. August Spies had the line struck out, but a few hundred copies were already in the street.
Rain thinned the crowd to a few hundred. Mayor Carter Harrison judged it peaceful and went home. Then 176 police marched in to break it up.
Someone threw a bomb.
The bomb killed Officer Mathias Degan almost at once. Police fired into the dark.
Seven officers and at least four other people died. No one ever proved who threw the bomb.
Eight men were convicted anyway. Prosecutors argued that their speeches and writings had inspired the bombing.
On November 11, 1887, four of them were hanged. One was Albert Parsons, who had led one of the May Day marches.
Two monuments came out of it. One honors the police who died. The other honors the anarchists who died.
Haymarket made many Americans fear unions. The Knights, the biggest, lost the most. In four years they fell from about 700,000 members to about 100,000.
In December 1886, craft unions formed the American Federation of Labor, led by a cigar maker, Samuel Gompers.
It stuck to bread and butter: wages, hours and conditions, won by collective bargaining. It grew slowly, and it lasted.
Some Knights kept going. In New Mexico, Juan José Herrera, a Knights organizer, helped lead Las Gorras Blancas, villagers who cut land-grabbers' fences.
Fort Frick
Homestead, 1892
Key terms: Craft union, Lockout, Pinkertons, Strikebreakers
In 1886, Andrew Carnegie wrote that workers' right to unionize was no less sacred than owners' right to organize.
Andrew Carnegie
There is an unwritten law among the best workmen: Thou shalt not take thy neighbor's job.
In 1892, Carnegie went to Scotland. Henry Clay Frick ran Homestead. Both men wanted the union out.
The skilled men's craft union, the Amalgamated Association, refused a pay cut and a contract that ended in midwinter. Frick locked everyone out. All 3,800 workers stuck together.
Frick fenced in the works: twelve feet high, three miles long, barbed wire on top, holes cut for rifles. Workers called it Fort Frick. Then he hired the Pinkertons.
The crowd tore through the fence and met the barges at the landing. Nobody knows for certain who fired first.
The fight went on all day. At least ten men died: seven workers and three Pinkertons.
At five o'clock the Pinkertons surrendered. The crowd beat many of them as they walked up the hill.
Six days later, about 8,500 state militia arrived. The mill reopened with strikebreakers under guard.
Then an anarchist, Alexander Berkman, shot and stabbed Frick. He had no tie to the union. Frick survived. Sympathy for the strikers didn't.
On November 20, the union gave up. Homestead's steelworkers wouldn't have a union again for forty-five years.
Henry Clay Frick
Our victory is now complete and most gratifying.
Carnegie cabled back from Italy.
Andrew Carnegie
Life is worth living again.
The Model Town
Pullman, 1893–1895
Key terms: Panic of 1893, American Railway Union, Boycott, Injunction, In re Debs (1895)
South of Chicago, George Pullman built a model town for the people who built his sleeping cars. He expected it to earn six percent.
In the Panic of 1893, Pullman cut wages by about a quarter. Rents and dividends stayed the same.
Pullman, May 1894, a week before the strike. The town can tell you why.
On May 11, after Pullman laid off members of their grievance committee, the workers struck.
The strikers turned to the new American Railway Union.
A Pullman striker
Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic.
Debs had built one union for every railroad worker, skilled or not. Every white one. The convention voted to keep Black workers out.
On June 26, union members refused to handle Pullman cars. Traffic froze across the West. Two days later, President Cleveland signed a law making Labor Day a national holiday.
Railroads coupled Pullman cars to mail trains, so stopping a sleeper meant stopping the U.S. mail.
Attorney General Richard Olney, a longtime railroad lawyer, went to federal court. On July 2, judges ordered the boycott stopped, partly under the Sherman Antitrust Act, a law meant for monopolies.
On July 4, federal troops marched into Chicago. Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld protested:
Gov. John Peter Altgeld
…it is entirely unnecessary, and, as it seems to me, unjustifiable.
Crowds burned hundreds of railcars. Soldiers and militia fired into crowds. Before it ended, about thirty people were dead.
Debs was arrested and the strike collapsed. He went to jail for defying the court's order.
Justice David J. Brewer
The strong arm of the national government may be put forth to brush away all obstructions to the freedom of interstate commerce…
The vote was unanimous. Employers now had a powerful weapon: the injunction.
Eugene V. Debs
…in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed.
He came out of jail a socialist.
Pullman died in 1897. His family buried him under concrete and steel rails, afraid his workers would dig him up.
What Labor Wants
1877–1900
Key terms: Laissez-faire, Argumentation (AP skill 6.C), Progressive Era, Fair Labor Standards Act (1938)
Four showdowns. Each time, the government's force ended up on the owners' side. Judges saw strikes as attacks on property. Many Americans feared another Haymarket. And replacement workers were easy to find.
Rising wages and armed barges aren't a contradiction. Real wages rose, but depressions brought wage cuts and layoffs.
Steelworkers still worked twelve-hour shifts, while the gap between rich and poor grew. So workers organized, and owners fought back.
In 1893, in Chicago, Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor gave his answer.
Samuel Gompers
We want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals;
Samuel Gompers
more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime;
Samuel Gompers
more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge…
In 1900, only about three workers in a hundred belonged to a union. But their questions about hours, safety and children at work didn't go away.
The eight-hour day took another fifty years.