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William Wood - "Captains of the Civil War, A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray"

Georg Ebers - "A Word Only A Word, Volume 2."

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Great Fortunes from Railroads

G >> Gustavus Myers >> Great Fortunes from Railroads




The propertied classes were not deceived. They knew that while this
labor movement nominally confined itself to one for a shorter
workday, yet its impetus was such that it contained the fullest
potentialities for developing into a mighty uprising against the very
system by which they were enabled to enrich themselves and enslave
the masses.

The moment this fact was discerned, both great and small capitalists
instinctively suspended hostilities. They tacitly agreed to hold
their bitter warfare for supremacy in abeyance, and unite in the face
of their common danger. The triangular conflict between the large and
small capitalists and the trades unions now resolved into a duel
between the propertied classes of all descriptions on the one hand,
and, on the other, the workingmen's organizations. The Farmers'
Alliance, essentially a middle-class movement of the employing
farmers in the South and West, was counted upon as aligned with the
propertied classes. On the part of the capitalists there was no unity
of organization in the sense of selected leaders or committees. It
was not necessary. A stronger bond than that of formal organization
drove them into acting in conscious unison--namely, the immediate
peril involved to their property interests. Apprehension soon gave
way to grim decision. This formidable labor movement had to be broken
and dispersed at any cost.

But how was the work of destruction to be done? This was the
predicament. Vested wealth could succeed in bribing a labor leader
here and there; but the movement had bounded far beyond the elemental
stage, and had become a glowing agitation which no traitor or set of
traitors could have stopped.

One effective way of discrediting and suppressing it there was; the
ancient one of virtually outlawing it, and throwing against it the
whole brute force of Government. The task of putting it down was
preëminently one for the police, army and judiciary. They had been
used to stifle many another protest of the workers; why not this? As
the great labor movement rolled on, enlisting the ardent attachment
of the masses, denouncing the injustices, corruption and robberies of
the existing industrial system, the propertied classes more acutely
understood that they must hasten to stamp it out by whatever means.
The municipal and State governments and the National Government,
completely representing their interests and ideas, and dominated by
them, stood ready to use force. But there had to be some kind of
pretext. The hosts of labor were acting peacefully and with
remarkable self control and discipline.

* * * * * * *

THE PROPERTIED CLASSES STRIKE BACK.

The propitious occasion soon came. It was in Chicago that the blow
was struck which succeeded in discrediting the cause of the workers,
stayed the progress of their movement, and covered it with a
prejudice and an odium lasting for years. There, in that maddening
bedlam, called a city, the acknowledged inferno of industrialism, the
agitation was tensest. With its brutalities, cruelties, corruptions
and industrial carnage, its hideous contrasts of dissolute riches and
woe-begone poverty, its arrogant wealth lashing the working
population lower and lower into squalor, pauperism and misery,
Chicago was overripe for any movement seeking to elevate conditions.

In the first months of 1886, strike followed strike throughout the
United States for an eight-hour day. At McCormick's reaper works in
Chicago [Footnote: The McCormick fortune was the outgrowth, to a
large extent, of a variety of frauds and corruptions. Later on in
this work, the facts are given as to how Cyrus H. McCormick, the
founder of the fortune, bribed Congress, in 1854, to give him a time
extension of his patent rights.] a prolonged strike of many months
began in February. Determined not only to refuse shorter hours, but
to force his twelve hundred wage workers to desert labor unions,
McCormick drove them from his factory, hired armed mercenaries,
called Pinkerton detectives, and substituted in the place of the
union workers those despised irresponsibles called "scabs"--
signifying laborers willing to help defeat the battles of organized
labor, and, if the unions won, share in the benefits without
incurring any of the responsibilities, risks or struggles. On May 1,
1886, forty thousand men and women in Chicago went on strike for an
eight-hour day. Thus far, the aim of inciting violence on the part of
the strikers had completely failed everywhere.

The Knights of Labor were conducting their strikes with a coolness,
method and sober sense of order, giving no opportunity for the
exercise of force. On May 2, a great demonstration of the McCormick
workers was held near that company's factories to protest against the
employment of armed Pinkertons. The Pinkerton detective bureau was a
private establishment, founded during the Civil War; in the ensuing
contests between labor and capital it was alleged to have made a
profitable business of supplying spies and armed men to capitalists
under the pretense of safeguarding property. These armed bands really
constituted private armies; recruited often from the most debased and
worthless part of the population, as well as from the needy and
shifty, they were, it was charged, composed largely of men who would
perjure themselves, fabricate evidence, provoke trouble, and
slaughter without scruple for pay. Some, as was well established,
were ex-convicts, others thugs, and still others were driven to the
ignoble employment by necessity. [Footnote: The prevailing view of
the working class toward the Pinkerton detectives was thus expressed
at the time in a chapter on the mine workers by John McBride, one of
the trade union leaders: "They have awakened," he wrote, "the hatred
and detestation of the workingmen of the United States; and this
hatred is due, not only to the fact that they protect the men who are
stealing the bread from the mouths of the families of strikers, but
to the fact that as a class they seem rather to invite trouble than
to allay it.... They are employed to terrorize the workingmen, and to
create in the minds of the public the idea that the miners are a
dangerous class of citizens that have to be kept down by armed force.
These men had an interest in keeping up and creating troubles which
gave employers opportunity to demand protection from the State
militia at the expense of the State, and which the State has too
readily granted."--"The Labor Movement": 264-265.] During the course
of the meeting in the afternoon the factory bell rung, and the
"scabs" were seen leaving. Some boys in the audience began throwing
stones and there was hooting. Fully aware of the combustible accounts
wanted by their offices, the reporters immediately telephoned
exaggerated, inflammatory stories of a riot being under way; the
police on the spot likewise notified headquarters. [Footnote: In a
statement published in the Chicago "Daily News," issue of May 10,
1889, Captain Ebersold, chief of police in 1886, charged that Captain
Schaack, who had been the police official most active in proceeding
against the labor leaders and causing them to be executed and
imprisoned, had deliberately set about concocting "anarchist"
conspiracies in order to get the credit for discovering and breaking
them up.] Police in large numbers soon arrived; the boys kept
throwing stones; and suddenly, without warning, the police drew their
revolvers and indiscriminately opened a general fire upon the men,
women and children in the crowd, killing four and wounding many.
Terror stricken and in horror the crowd fled.

There was a group of radical spirits in Chicago, popularly branded as
anarchists, but in reality men of advanced ideas who, while differing
from one another in economic views, agreed in denouncing the existing
system as the prolific cause of bitter wrongs and rooted injustices.
Sincere, self-sacrificing, intellectual, outspoken, absolutely
devoted to their convictions, burning with compassion and noble
ideals for suffering humanity, they had stepped forward and had
greatly assisted in arousing the militant spirit in the working class
in Chicago. At all of the meetings they had spoken with an ardor and
ability that put them in the front ranks of the proletarian leaders;
and in two newspapers published by them, the "Alarm," in English, and
the "Arbeiter Zeitung," in German, they unceasingly advocated the
interests of the working class. These men were Albert R. Parsons, a
printer, editor of the "Alarm;" August Spies, an upholsterer by
trade, and editor of the "Arbeiter Zeitung;" Adolph Fischer, a
printer; Louis Lingg, a carpenter; Samuel Fielden, the son of a
British factory owner; George Engel, a painter; Oscar Neebe, a well-
to-do business man, and Michael Schwab, a bookbinder. All of them
were more or less deep students of economics and sociology; they had
become convinced that the fundamental cause of the prevalent
inequalities of opportunity and of the widespread misery was the
capitalist system itself. Hence they opposed it uncompromisingly.
[Footnote: The utterances of these leaders revealed the reasons why
they were so greatly feared by the capitalist class. Fischer, for
instance, said: "I perceive that the diligent, never-resting human
working bees, who create all wealth and fill the magazines with
provisions, fuel and clothing, enjoy only a minor part of this
product, while the drones, the idlers, keep the warehouses locked up,
and revel in luxury and voluptuousness." Engel said: "The history of
all times teaches us that the oppressing always maintain their
tyrannies by force and violence. Some day the war will break out;
therefore all workingmen should unite and prepare for the last war,
the outcome of which will be the end forever of all war, and bring
peace and happiness to mankind."]

The newspapers, voicing the interests and demands of the intrenched
classes, denounced these radicals with a sinister emphasis as
destructionists. But it was not ignorance which led them to do this;
it was intended as a deliberate poisoning and inflaming of public
opinion. Themselves bribing, corrupting, intimidating, violating laws
and slaying for profit everywhere, the propertied classes ever
assumed, as has so often been pointed out, the pose of being the
staunch conservers of law and order. To fasten upon the advanced
leaders of the labor movement the stigma of being sowers of disorder,
and then judicially get rid of them, and crush the spirit and
movement of the aroused proletariat--this was the plan determined
upon. Labor leaders who confined their programme to the industrial
arena were not feared so much; but Parsons, Spies and their comrades
were not only pointing out to the masses truths extremely unpalatable
to the capitalists, but were urging, although in a crude way, a
definite political movement to overthrow capitalism. With the finest
perception, fully alert to their danger, the propertied classes were
intent upon exterminating this portentous movement by striking down
its leaders and terrifying their followers.


THE HAYMARKET TRAGEDY.

Fired with indignation at the slaughter at the McCormick meeting,
Spies and others of his group issued a call for a meeting on the
night of May 4, at the Haymarket, to protest against the police
assaults. Spies opened the meeting, and was followed by Fielden.
Observers agreed that the meeting was proceeding in perfect quiet, so
quietly that the Mayor of Chicago, who was present to suppress it if
necessary, went home--when suddenly one hundred and eighty policemen,
with arms in readiness, appeared and peremptorily ordered the meeting
to disperse. It seems that without pausing for a reply they
immediately charged, and began clubbing and mauling the few hundred
persons present. At this juncture a small bomb, thrown by someone,
exploded in the ranks of the police, felling sixty and killing one.
The police instantly began firing into the crowd.

No one has ever been able to find out definitely who threw the bomb.
Suspicions were not lacking that it was done by a mercenary of
corporate wealth. At Pittsburg, in 1877, as we have seen, the
Pennsylvania railroad hirelings deliberately destroyed property and
incited riot in order to charge the strikers with crime. In the coal
mining regions of Pennsylvania, subsidized detectives had provoked
trouble during the strikes, and by means of bogus evidence and packed
juries had hung some labor leaders and imprisoned others.

The hurling of the bomb, whether done by a secret emissary, or by a
sympathizer with labor, proved the lever which the propertied classes
had been feverishly awaiting. Spies, Fielding and their comrades were
at once cast into jail; the newspapers invented wild yarns of
conspiracies and midnight plots, and raucously demanded the hanging
of the leaders. The trifling formality of waiting until their guilt
had been proved was not considered. The most significant event,
however, was the secret meeting of about three hundred leading
American capitalists to plan the suppression of "anarchy." Very
horrified they professed themselves to be at violent outrages and
destruction of property and life. Their views were given wide
circulation and commendation; they were the finest types of
commercial success and prestige. They were the owners of railroads
that slaughtered thousands of human beings every year, because of the
demands of profit; of factories which sucked the very life out of
their toilers, and which filled the hospitals, slums, brothels and
graveyards with an ever-increasing assemblage; every man in that
conclave, as a beneficiary of the existing system, had drained his
fortune from the sweat, sorrow, miseries and death agonies of a
multitude of workers. [Footnote: This seems a very sweeping and
extraordinary prejudicial statement. It should be remembered,
however, that these capitalists, both individually and collectively,
had contested the passage of every proposed law, the aim of which was
to improve conditions for the workers on the railroads and in mines
and factories. Time after time they succeeded in defeating or
ignoring this legislation. Although the number of workers killed or
injured in accidents every year was enormous, and although the number
slain by diseases contracted in workshops or dwellings was even
greater, the capitalists insisted that the law had no right to
interfere with the conduct of their "private business."] These were
the men who came forth to form the "Citizens' Association," and
within a few hours subscribed $100,000 as a fighting fund.


JUDICIAL MURDER OF LABOR'S LEADERS.

The details of the trial will not be gone into here. The trial itself
is now everywhere recognized as having been a tragic farce. The jury,
it is clear, was purposely drawn from the employing class, or their
dependents; of a thousand talesmen summoned, only five or six
belonged to the working class. The malignant class nature of the
trial was revealed by the questions asked of the talesmen; nearly all
declared that they had a prejudice against Socialists, Anarchists and
Communists. Soon the blindest could see that the conviction of the
group was determined upon in advance, and that it was but the visible
evidence of a huge conspiracy to terrorize the whole working class.

The theory upon which the group was prosecuted was that they were
actively engaged in a conspiracy against the existing authorities,
and that they advocated violence and bloodshed. No jurist would now
presume to contend that the slightest evidence was adduced to prove
this. But all were rushed to conviction: Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and
Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887, after fruitless appeals to
the higher courts; Lingg committed suicide in prison, and Fielden,
Neebe and Schwab were sentenced to long terms in prison. The four
executed leaders met their death with the heroic calmness of
martyrdom. "Let the voice of the people be heard!" were Parsons' last
words. Fielden, Neebe and Schwab might have rotted away in prison,
were it not that one of the noblest-minded and most maligned men of
his time, in the person of John P. Altgeld, was Governor of Illinois
in 1893. Governor Altgeld pardoned them on these grounds, which he
undoubtedly proved in an exhaustive review: (1) The jury was a packed
one selected to convict; (2) the jurors were prejudiced; (3) no guilt
was proved; (4) the State's attorney had admitted no case against
Neebe, yet he had been imprisoned; (5)the trial judge (Gary) was
either so prejudiced or subservient to class influence that he did
not or could not give a fair trial. Even many of those who denounced
Altgeld for this action, now admit that his grounds were justified.


THE LABOR UPRISING IN NEW YORK.

In the meanwhile, between the time of the Haymarket episode and the
hanging and imprisonment of the Chicago group, the labor movement in
New York City had assumed so strong a political form that the ruling
class was seized with consternation. The Knights of Labor, then at
the summit of organization and solidarity, were ripe for independent
political action; the effects of the years of active propaganda
carried on in their ranks by the Socialists and Single-Tax advocates
now began to show fruit. At the critical time, when the labor unions
were wavering in the decision as to whether they ought to strike out
politically or not, the ruling class supplied the necessary vital
impulsion. While in Chicago the courts were being used to condemn the
labor leaders to death or prison, in the East they were used to
paralyze the weapons of offense and defence by which the unions were
able to carry on their industrial warfare.

The conviction, in New York City, of certain members of a union for
declaring a boycott, proved the one compelling force needed to mass
all of the unions and radical societies and individuals into a mighty
movement resulting in an independent labor party. To meet this
exigency an effort was made by the politicians to buy off Henry
George, the distinguished Single-Tax advocate, who was recognized as
the leader of the labor party. But this flanking attempt at bribing
an incorruptible man failed; the labor unions proceeded to nominate
George for Mayor, and a campaign was begun of an ardor, vigor and
enthusiasm such as had not been known since the Workingmen's party
movement in 1829.

The election was for local officers of the foremost city in the
United States--a point of vantage worth contending for, since the
moral effect of such a victory of the working class would be
incalculable, even if short-lived. To the ruling classes the triumph
of the labor unions, while restricted to one city, would unmistakably
denote the glimmerings of the beginning of the end of their regime.
Such rebellious movements are highly contagious; from the confines of
one municipality they sweep on to other sections, stimulating action
and inspiring emulation. The New York labor campaign of 1886 was an
intrinsic part and result of the general labor movement throughout
the United States. And it was the most significant manifestation of
the onward march of the workers; elsewhere the labor unions had not
gone beyond the stage of agitation and industrial warfare; but in New
York, with the most acute perception of the real road it must
traverse, the labor movement had plunged boldly into political
action. It realized that it must get hold of the governmental powers.
Its antagonists, the capitalists, had long had a rigid grip on them,
and had used them almost wholly as they willed.

But the capitalist class was even more doggedly determined upon
retaining and intensifying those powers. Government was an essential
requisite to its plans and development. The small capitalists
bitterly fought the great; but both agreed that Government with its
legislators, laws, precedents, and the habits of thought it created,
must be capitalistic. Both saw in the uprising of labor a prospective
overturning of conditions.

From this identity of interest a singular concrete alliance resulted.
The great capitalists, whom the middle-class had denounced as
pirates, now became the decorous and orthodox "saviors of society,"
with the small capitalists trailing behind their leadership, and
shouting their praises as the upholders of law and the conservators
of order. In Chicago the same men who had bribed legislators and
common councils to give them public franchises, and who had hugely
swindled and stolen under guise of law, had been the principals in
calling for the execution and imprisonment of the group of labor
leaders, and this they had decreed in the name of law. In New York
City a pretext for dealing similarly with the labor leaders was
entirely lacking, but another method was found effective in the
subjugation and dispersion of the movement.


CAPITALIST TRIUMPH BY FRAUD.

This was the familiar one of corruption and fraud. It was a method in
the exercise of which the capitalists as a class had proved
themselves adepts; they now summoned to their aid all of the ignoble
and subterranean devices of criminal politics.

In the New York City election of 1886 three parties contested, the
Labor party, Tammany Hall and the Republican party. Steeped in
decades of the most loathsome corruption, Tammany Hall was chosen as
the medium by which the Labor party was to be defrauded and effaced.
Pretending to be the "champion of the people's rights," and boasting
that it stood for democracy against aristocracy, Tammany Hall had
long deceived the mass of the people to plunder them. It was a
powerful, splendidly-organized body of mercenaries and selfseekers
which, by trading on the principles of democracy, had been able to
count on the partisan votes of a predominating element of the wage-
working class. In reality, however, it was absolutely directed by a
leader or "boss," who, with his confederates, made a regular traffic
of selling legislation to the capitalists, on the one hand, and who,
on the other, enriched themselves by a colossal system of blackmail.
They sold immunity to pickpockets, confidence men and burglars,
compelled the saloonkeepers to pay for protection, and even extorted
from the wretched women of the street and brothels. This was the
organization that the ruling class, with its fine assumptions of
respectability, now depended upon to do its work of breaking up the
political labor revolt.

The candidate of Tammany Hall was the ultra-respectable Abram S.
Hewitt, a millionaire capitalist. The Republican party nominated a
verbose, pushful, self-glorifying young man, who, by a combination of
fortuitous circumstances, later attained the position of President of
the United States. This was Theodore Roosevelt, the scion of a
moderately rich New York family, and a remarkable character whose
pugnacious disposition, indifference to political conventionalities,
capacity for exhortation, and bold political shrewdness were mistaken
for greatness of personality. The phenomenal success to which he
subsequently rose was characteristic of the prevailing turgidity and
confusion of the popular mind. Both Hewitt and Roosevelt were, of
course, acceptable to the capitalist class. As, however, New York was
normally a city of Democratic politics, and as Hewitt stood the
greater chance of winning, the support of those opposed to the labor
movement was concentrated upon him.

Intrenched respectability, for the most part, came forth to join
sanctimony with Tammany scoundrelism. It was an edifying union, yet
did not comprise all of the forces linked in that historic coalition.
The Church, as an institution, cast into it the whole weight of its
influence and power. Soaked with the materialist spirit while
dogmatically preaching the spiritual, dominated and pervaded by
capitalist influences, the Church, of all creeds and denominations,
lost no time in subtly aligning itself in its expected place. And woe
to the minister or priest who defied the attitude of his church!
Father McGlynn, for example, was excommunicated by the Pope,
ostensibly for heretical utterances, but in actuality for espousing
the cause of the labor movement.

Despite every legitimate argument coupled with venomous ridicule and
coercive and corrupt influence that wealth, press and church could
bring to bear, the labor unions stood solidly together. On election
day groups of Tammany repeaters, composed of dissolutes, profligates,
thugs and criminals, systematically, under directions from above,
filled the ballot boxes with fraudulent votes. The same rich class
that declaimed with such superior indignation against rule by the
"mob" had poured in funds which were distributed by the politicians
for these frauds. But the vote of the labor forces was so
overwhelming, that even piles of fraudulent votes could not suffice
to overcome it. One final resource was left. This was to count out
Henry George by grossly tampering with the election returns and
misrepresenting them. And this is precisely what was done, if the
testimony of numerous eye-witnesses is to be believed. The Labor
party, it is quite clear, was deliberately cheated out of an election
won in the teeth of the severest and most corrupt opposition. This
result it had to accept; the entire elaborate machinery of elections
was in the full control of the Labor party's opponents; and had it
instituted a contest in the courts, the Labor party would have found
its efforts completely fruitless in the face of an adverse judiciary.

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