Alan Axelrod - Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

Although the labor movement would not fully recover from these early blows until the 1930s an enduring union did emerge in 1886. The American Federation of Labor was led by a former cigar maker named Samuel Gompers (1850-1924). What set this union apart from the Knights of Labor was that it did not attempt to lump together all trades, skilled and unskilled. Recognizing that working people had certain common interests, but also had differing needs, the AFL existed as a coordinating group for separate trades. The union, which agitated for an eight-hour day, workmen’s compensation, controls on immigrant labor, and protection from “technological unemployment” created by automation, exists today as the AFL-CIO.

Although reasonably successful, the AFL did little to address the needs of unskilled labor. So in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was formed by the Western Federation of Miners and a number of other labor organizations. Eugene Debs was an early force in this, the most radical of American labor unions, but leadership soon passed to William “Big Bill” Haywood (1869-1928). The “Wobblies,” as IWW members were disparagingly called, vowed permanent class warfare against employers and looked forward to nothing less than a revolution, which would replace capitalism with an “industrial democracy.” The Wobblies’ many opponents simply swore that IWW stood for “I Won’t Work.”

Where unions fell short of looking after the needs, wishes, and demands of the masses, American city governments spawned “bosses” who operated “political machines.” The big-city boss was characteristically a demagogue, who presented himself as a common man looking out for the interests of the common man. In reality, bosses were corrupt politicians, enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of their constituents.

Typical of the big-city bosses was William Marcy Tweed (1823-78) of New York, who worked his way up through the city’s political machine (known as Tammany Hall, after the name of a powerful Democratic club). Tweed eventually came to dominate municipal and then state politics. In 1861, Tweed had scarcely a dollar to his name; by 1871, he had amassed a fortune in excess of $2.5 million—all built on influence peddling and kickbacks from the sale of city contracts and franchises. Tweed gathered about himself a band of cronies, called the Tweed Ring, who collectively siphoned off anywhere from $40 million to $200 million in public funds. Tweed was convicted of fraud in 1873, but he fled to Spain. During his heyday, he had been ruthlessly caricatured by the great political cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902), and in 1876, Tweed was recognized through a Nast cartoon. As a result, Tweed was arrested and returned to New York, where he died after serving two years in prison.

The flight and subsequent imprisonment of Boss Tweed did not bring down Tammany Hall; Thomas Croker and “Honest John” Kelly soon took Tweed’s place. Nor was New York unique in being run by a machine and a boss. During the later 19th century, Pittsburgh had its Chris Magee and Bill Finn, Philadelphia its “King Jim” McMahon, Boston its “Czar” Martin Lomansey, and St. Louis its “Colonel” Ed Butler.

The Age of the Machine soon gave rise to an Age of Reform in response to it. The Shame of the Cities, written in 1904 by freelance journalist and passionate reformer Lincoln Steffens, exposed the corruption of St. Louis and showed that it was typical of big-city America. Public outrage flared, making way for such crusading politicians as Theodore Roosevelt and Robert M. La Follette.

Talk of corruption and reform was all well and good, but to many, the subject seemed rather abstract and remote. It took a novel, The Jungle, written in 1906 by a socialist writer named Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), to bring corruption and reform—quite literally—to the gut level. Sinclair described the plight of one Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who worked in a Chicago meat-packing plant. Through the eyes of this downtrodden and exploited worker, Sinclair described in sickening detail the horrors of modern meat packing. To fatten the bottom line, packers did not hesitate to use decayed meat, tubercular meat, offal, even rat meat in the manufacture of meat products. Comfortable middle-class Americans may or may not care about the exploitation of a blue-collar Lithuanian immigrant, but the idea of big business poisoning them and their families was truly nauseating. As a result of the indignation stirred by The Jungle, Congress enacted the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act a mere six months after the novel was published.

Sinclair was one of a group of writers President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a progressive reformer, dubbed “muckrakers.” Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell (author of a landmark expose of Standard Oil), and other journalists, caught up in the Progressive movement sweeping the nation, reported on the corruption and exploitation that seemed rampant in Gilded Age America. The muckrakers exposed child labor practices, slum life, racial persecution, prostitution, sweatshop labor, and the general sins of big business and machine politics.

The muckrakers succeeded in galvanizing popular opinion and motivating government action. Under President Theodore Roosevelt, antitrust laws were used to break up certain monopolies or trusts. After a long government assault, Standard Oil, most notorious of the trusts, was broken up into 34 companies in 1911. Under Roosevelt, too, public lands were protected from private exploitation, and he is considered a pioneer of the environmental movement. During the Roosevelt era, government also stepped in to establish and enforce standards of purity in food and drugs. The government created safeguards to curb unfair exploitation of workers and restricted child labor. On a local level, cities embarked on programs to clean up slum districts and to educate immigrants and youth.

Three years after Roosevelt left office, Robert M. La Follette, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, led a faction of the most reform-minded Republicans to form a third party, the Progressive Party. The new party drafted an enthusiastic Roosevelt as its standard bearer in the 1912 presidential elections. The Progressives sought a middle road between traditional conservatism on the one hand and populism on the other, without veering toward socialist radicalism. The Progressives advocated programs of moral uplift, such as Chicago’s Hull House, founded in 1889 by social activist Jane Addams. Hull House became a model for providing recreational facilities to slum children, advocating child labor laws, and “Americanizing” immigrants. The Progressives also supported clean government, women’s suffrage, and prohibition. Although many people, contemporaries and historians alike, criticized Progressivism as narrow-minded and ultimately supportive of the status quo, its spirit changed American government, bringing it more intimately and thoroughly into the everyday lives of everyday Americans.

In 19th-century America, the great fortunes were made on the backs of working men and women, but the labor movement gradually brought a greater degree of democracy to U.S. society.

The greed and corruption rampant after the Civil War triggered a sweeping reform movement, Progressivism, which encompassed politics, social justice, and general moral “uplift.”

Were immigrants welcome in the United States? Not always. Were they exploited and discriminated against? Sometimes. Yet, despite this treatment, America offered the best hope for peoples oppressed, starved, and made desperate in the nations of their birth. The poet Emma Lazarus (1849-87) expressed these sentiments in the poem she composed for inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The statue was created by the sculptor Frederic August Bartholdi and presented to the United States as a gift from the French people. The coolly majestic 151-foot-high female figure (modeled after the artist’s mother), holding aloft a torch and carrying a tablet inscribed with the date of American independence, was unveiled in New York Harbor in 1886. Here are the closing lines of the Lazarus sonnet: