After the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, labor conflict erupted into strikes

The March of Capital

• As the country industrialized, labor unrest grew

• Because the railroads had effectively marshaled capital, government support, and bureaucracy, they were hit by the most significant strikes first

• Skill mattered less in an industrialized, mass-producing economy

  • Long hours, dangerous working conditions, and the difficulty of supporting a family on 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, which had become cheaper and more efficient

• By the turn of the century, corporate leaders and wealthy industrialists embraced the new principles of scientific management or Taylorism

  • Taylorism encouraged manufacturers to increase efficiency by subdividing tasks

  • Eventually, the assembly line (made famous by Henry Ford) allowed the production of automobiles to skyrocket as their cost plummeted

• Industrialization and mass production pushed the United States to the forefront of the world

• 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

The Rise of Inequality

• Industrial capitalism realized the greatest advances in efficiency and productivity that the world had ever seen, but it also created millions of low-paid, unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working conditions

• This era was known as the Gilded Age (the notion of a glittering world of wealth and technological innovation masking massive social inequities and deep-seated corruption)

• The sudden appearance of the extreme wealth of industrial and financial leaders alongside the crippling squalor of the urban and rural poor shocked Americans

  • As these vast and unprecedented new fortunes accumulated among a small number of wealthy Americans, new ideas arose to bestow moral legitimacy upon them

    • This was known as social Darwinism, where the fittest would demonstrate their superiority through economic success

      • The theory states that because all species were governed by the struggle to survive, the inequality of outcomes was to be not merely tolerated but encouraged and celebrated

• Politics also protected the rich and the businesses that supported them

  • Republicans had the most control at this time, and had a great interest in protecting businesses and this burgeoning economy

  • Republicans provided the protective foundation for a new American industrial order, while 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

The Labor Movement

• The ideas of social Darwinism attracted little support among the mass of American industrial laborers, who toiled in the labor force

• 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, with union memberships skyrocketing

  • One such labor union was the Knights of Labor, who welcomed all laborers (including women, but not including lawyers, bankers, professional gamblers, and liquor dealers)

    • The Knights envisioned a cooperative producer-centered society that rewarded labor, not capital

    • They focused on practical gains rather than anything radical

    • The Knights of Labor collapsed after labor leaders and radicals called for a protest at Haymarket Square, which police tried to break up

      • As they did, a bomb exploded and killed seven policemen

      • Because of the Haymarket Affair, the group became associated with violence and radicalism

  • The American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor

    • The AFL only allowed skilled laborers and aimed for practical gains (higher wages, fewer hours, and safer conditions) while trying to avoid strikes

The Populist Movement

• Frustrated American farmers attempted to reshape the fundamental structures of the nation’s political and economic systems

  • They believed these systems enriched parasitic bankers and industrial monopolists at the expense of the many laboring farmers who fed the nation by producing its many crops and farm goods

  • Farmers organized and launched their challenge first through the cooperatives of the Farmers’ Alliance and later through the politics of the People’s (or Populist) Party

• Texas agrarians met in Lampasas, Texas, in 1877 and organized the first Farmers’ Alliance to restore some economic power to farmers as they dealt with railroads, merchants, and bankers

  • The alliance’s most innovative programs were a series of farmers’ cooperatives that enabled farmers to negotiate higher prices for their crops and lower prices for the goods they purchased

• Eventually, the Farmer’s Alliance organized a political party known as the People’s Party or the Populists

  • Populists attracted supporters across the nation by appealing to those convinced that there were deep flaws in the political economy of Gilded Age America, flaws that both political parties refused to address

  • The Omaha Platform and the larger Populist movement sought to counter the scale and power of monopolistic capitalism with a strong, engaged, and modern federal government

Willaim Jennings Bryan and the Politics of Gold

• William Jennings Bryan (March 19, 1860–July 26, 1925) accomplished many different things in his life: he was a skilled orator, a Nebraska congressman, a three-time presidential candidate, U.S. secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, and a lawyer who supported prohibition and opposed Darwinism

  • He believed that bimetallism, by inflating American currency, could alleviate farmers’ debts

    • In contrast, Republicans championed the gold standard and a flat money supply

• In early 1900, Congress passed the Gold Standard Act, which put the country on the gold standard, effectively ending the debate over the nation’s monetary policy

The Socialists

• American socialists carried on the Populists’ radical tradition by uniting farmers and workers in a sustained, decades-long political struggle to reorder American economic life

  • Socialists argued that wealth and power were consolidated in the hands of too few individuals

• Karl Marx described the new industrial economy as a worldwide class struggle between the wealthy bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production, such as factories and farms, and the proletariat, factory workers and tenant farmers who worked only for the wealth of others

• The socialist movement drew from a diverse constituency, party membership was open to all regardless of race, gender, class, ethnicity, or religion