Alan Axelrod - Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

In This Chapter

Immigration and opposition to immigration

Oklahoma land rush

Labor organization to fight oppression

Corruption and reform

“History,” said the English writer Thomas Carlyle, “is the biographies of great men.” For a long time, most historians thought of their craft in this way. Thus the tale of the last quarter of the 19th century might be told exclusively through the lives of Carnegie, Gould, Rockefeller, Ford, and the rest. However, more recent historians have come to realize that these biographies relate only part of the story. History is also an account of ordinary people, the working men and women whose lives were influenced, even shaped, by the actions of politicians, robber barons, and (to use another phrase of Carlyle) the “captains of industry.” While the moneyed elite fought one another for control of more and more capital, the nation’s working people were tossed on the brutal seas of an economic tempest. Fortunes were being made and great inventions created, but for plain folk, the waning century presented plenty of hard times.

America is a nation of immigrants. During the 17th century, colonial entrepreneurs actively recruited new settlers. Most of the early immigrants spoke English, but by the 18th century, waves of German immigrants arrived as well, causing alarm and resentment among the English-speakers, especially those who had been born on these shores. Yet, gradually, the German immigrants and those of the Anglo-American mainstream came to terms.

The next great wave of immigration began in 1841, when Ireland suffered a great potato famine, which caused untold hardship and even starvation. Millions left the country, most of them bound for the United States. The influx of Irish-Catholics into what was principally an Anglo-Protestant nation prompted many to worry that “their” American culture would crumble. The Irish immigrants were subjected to abuse and prejudice, some of it even backed by local legislation.

Beginning around 1880, the clamoring demands of American industry began to drown out the anti-immigrant chorus. Immigrant labor was cheap labor, and employers looked for unskilled and semiskilled workers to feed newly emerging assembly lines and do the heavy lifting required to build bridges and raise skyscrapers. American employers called not only on the German states and Ireland, but also on southern and eastern Europe, encouraging the immigration of Italians, Greeks, Turks, Russians, and Slavs. For the first time, substantial numbers of Jews came to the United States, adding a new element to the nation’s blend of ethnic identities and religious faiths.

While the cities of the East and the Midwest tended to assimilate the new immigrants readily, resistance to immigration remained strong in the West and Southwest. Not that employers in these regions scrupled against hiring foreigners; they just didn’t want the workers to enjoy citizenship. Asians, prized as hard workers, were barred from attaining U.S. citizenship by naturalization laws. In the Southwest, migrant labor from Mexico provided a scandalously cheap source of temporary farm workers. By 1882, prejudice against Asians resulted in passage of the first of a series of Chinese Exclusion Acts, which blocked the importation of Chinese laborers. However, authorities winked at the continued influx of Mexican migrants, some of whom came lawfully and others not.

By the second decade of the 20th century, most Americans were eager to close the golden door. In 1917, would-be immigrants were required to pass a literacy test, and in 1924, Congress set a strict limit on immigration—154,000 persons annually. Congress also established quotas aimed at reducing immigration from southern and eastern European countries.

At the end of the 19th century, most large American cities were deeply divided places. Established citizens lived in varying degrees of prosperity, decently clothed, fed, and housed, while many of the newer arrivals languished in overcrowded, dilapidated, and ultimately crime-plagued slums. The middle-class reaction to this “other half” of America was to ignore it—at least until Jacob August Riis (1849-1914), a New York journalist, published an eye-opening study in text and photographs of his city’s slum life. How the Other Half Lives (1890), Theodore Roosevelt declared, came as “an enlightenment and an inspiration.” The book heralded reform movements not only in New York, but across the nation.

If, to easterners, the United States seemed to be turning into a nation of crowded cities with teeming slums, the dream of wide-open western spaces had by no means died. At noon on April 22, 1889, government officials fired signal guns, sending hundreds of homesteaders racing across the border of Indian Territory to stake claims. It was the greatest mass settlement of the West since the Homestead Act of 1862, and the event kindled or rekindled the American dream not only in those who rushed to new lands, but in other Americans who experienced the excitement vicariously.

The kindling of one dream meant that another was extinguished. The government rescinded its agreements to protect and preserve Indian Territory for the Native Americans who were forcibly removed to it by the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and subsequent legislation. The great land rush led to statehood for Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma on November 16, 1907, and tribal lands were drastically reduced in the process.

The Indians, victimized by U.S. land policy, could do little but appeal (mostly in vain) to the American conscience, The laboring man, victimized by big business operating in the absence of government regulation, began to fight back by organizing unions. The Knights of Labor was founded in 1878 as a national union of skilled as well as unskilled workers. The Knights agitated for the universal adoption of the eight-hour day, and targeting the railroads (the “octopus,” as novelist Frank Norris had called them), the union struck against several lines in 1877. The strike brought rail traffic to a halt and won certain concessions. However, in 1886, after a general strike failed in Chicago and the Haymarket Riot ensued, the Knights of Labor also dissolved.

While the courts generally eased restrictions on labor strikes during the 19th century, legislators did not act to protect strikers. As a result, violence between employers and unions was frequent. In 1892, workers struck the Carnegie Steel Company plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, after company manager Henry Clay Frick imposed a wage cut. On June 29, Frick hired some 300 Pinkerton detectives to run the plant, and on July 6, an armed confrontation occurred, resulting in several deaths. The state militia was called in to protect nonunion laborers, who worked the mills from July 12 to November 20, at which point the strike collapsed.

As a result of the Homestead Strike, the nation’s union movement suffered a severe setback, which was compounded two years later during the Pullman Strike of 1894. This violent confrontation between railroad workers and the Pullman Palace Car Company of Illinois tied up rail traffic across the United States from May to July. Workers, who lived in the company-owned town of Pullman (today a part of Chicago’s south side) were protesting wage cuts that had been made without corresponding reductions in company-levied rents and other employee charges. Laborers belonging to the American Railway Union protested—and were summarily fired. Railway union head Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) called a boycott of all Pullman cars, an action to which Pullman lawyers responded by using the newly enacted Sherman anti-trust legislation against the strikers. On July 2, a court injunction was issued to halt the strike. Federal troops were dispatched to enforce the injunction, and a riot broke out, during which several strikers were killed. The strike was crushed by July 10.