A Liberal Dose, May 6, 2021 "The Legacy of Haymarket Square"

 

A Liberal Dose  May 6, 2021

"The Legacy of Haymarket Square"

Troy D. Smith

Although there have been labor actions for as long as we’ve been a country, the roots of the modern labor movement as we now know it go back to the 1870s, during the “Gilded Age.” It was a time of rapid technological change, expanding industry, and saw the making of great fortunes (names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie come to mind). Working class people, however, fell behind. The gap between rich and poor –which, of course, had always been there –widened significantly. Farmers, railroad workers, factory workers, and so on felt that they were being treated unfairly and started calling for more rights. A forty-hour workweek, for example, as well as safety regulations for the workplace and compensation when injured on the job. Some successful entrepreneurs –called “robber barons” by people who didn’t like them –justified the rampant economic inequality by adopting some of the ideas Charles Darwin had introduced, especially “survival of the fittest,” in a philosophy called “social Darwinism.” This philosophy essentially stated that, if you’re poor, it’s because you are an inferior person –either lazy, incompetent, or morally deficient, with no consideration of circumstances. If you are rich, on the other hand, it is because you deserve to be –or you wouldn’t be rich to begin with. This viewpoint shows the contempt in which poor and working class people were held by those who prospered on their labor, and sadly it has been making a comeback in the 21^st century.

In 1877 railroad workers went on strike after having a ten percent reduction in their wages, the third such cut in a year. Many workers were already frustrated that year because of the presidential election. Working class people around the country had voted in large numbers for Democrat Samuel Tilden of New York, who won the popular vote. Neither he nor Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio had an electoral majority –but Tilden was only one vote shy. Despite all that, in a Congressional move known in history as The Compromise of 1877, the victory was given to Rutherford in return for ending Reconstruction. Workers felt disenfranchised. Unfortunately, though the strike had heavy participation and support from workers in other industries, it was not efficiently organized and fell apart under the weight of violent union-busters (around 100 strikers were killed). This failure led to more emphasis on organizing, and the growth of groups like the Knights of Labor (which grew tenfold in two years) and the Farmer’s Alliance.

This brings us to May 1, 1886. Labor unions around the country coordinated to call a general strike on that day in support of an 8-hour workday. It is estimated that up to 500,000 workers walked off the job that day and joined protest parades. In some cities, the protests lasted for days. In Chicago, tensions escalated between protesting strikers and replacement workers at the McCormick Harvesting plant; 400 police were dispatched to keep order, and they wound up firing into the crowd of strikers and killing at least two. Strike supporters were outraged, and immediately another protest was called for the next day –this one a protest against police violence, to be held at Haymarket Square. One of the principal organizers was a man named Albert Parsons.

Albert Parsons was from Alabama. Orphaned at a young age, he had moved to Texas to be raised by an older brother in the newspaper business. When the Civil War started, 13-year-old Albert joined the Confederate Army. He initially served as a “powder monkey,” a common job for young teens, but by the end of the war four years later he was in the cavalry and the veteran of many battles. After the war, he continued in his brother’s newspaper trade, eventually becoming a reporter and an editor. He came to openly support the struggles of freed slaves, who were terribly mistreated in general, which did not make him popular in Reconstruction Texas. He became even more unpopular when he went from supporting ex-slaves to marrying one: a multiracial woman named Lucy Gonzales. In the early 1870s, Albert and Lucy moved to Chicago, where he continued to work in newspapers. However, after writing an editorial in support of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 while it was going on, Albert was fired from his reporting job. He left the Republican Party and joined the Social Democratic Party, and after a few years moved farther left than that and became an anarchist. Anarchist is another of those terms that most people today misunderstand, thinking it means “someone who wants to sow chaos.” The word anarchy literally means “without government,” and as a political ideal it calls for absolute freedom of the individual. If there were no government imposing authority, anarchists say, everyone would get along better and be more free. An anarchist, then, in the classic sense, is basically a libertarian on steroids.

Parsons and several other anarchists either in or closely aligned with the labor movement called for and organized the Haymarket Square rally on May 4, 1886. There was a large police presence, but at first everything was pretty peaceful, even boring. It started raining, and several protesters went home. Albert and Lucy Parsons, who had brought their children to the event, were among those who left. Later in the day, though, a match was metaphorically (and in a sense literally) struck on the powder keg. The police advanced on the protesters and ordered them to disperse; the workers insisted that they were being peaceful and had done nothing wrong. As the police drew closer, someone in the crowd threw a homemade bomb at them, and seven officers were killed. The other officers opened fire on the crowd, killing four. As is often the case, each side blamed the other for starting the violence.

To this day, no one knows who threw the bomb. The Chicago city government, though, decreed that someone had to pay. They arrested the people who organized the rally on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. Seven anarchists, including Albert Parsons (who had not even been present) were sentenced to death, and an eighth to prison. Two of the five had their sentences commuted to life, and one of the remaining five committed suicide, but Parsons and the other three were hanged on a public scaffold despite appeals from around the world. On the way to the scaffold they sang the “Marseillaise,” the French national anthem and a call for revolution against corruption. Parsons asked to be allowed a final statement, and the trapdoor was sprung on him mid-sentence. Lucy Parsons remained a labor activist for the rest of her life, and went on to be a co-founder of International Workers of the World.

The U.S. adopted Labor Day in 1894, but President Grover Cleveland did not want it to be May 1 like everyone else because it would draw attention to the Haymarket event (which was by then already a national embarrassment) and embolden anarchists. Instead, May 1 is “Law Day” and “Loyalty Day.”

Most of the reforms they were protesting for eventually came to pass. If you’ve ever been paid overtime or worker’s compensation, never forget what it took to get you there.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found HERE

A list of historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Troy D. Smith's author web page: http://www.troyduanesmith.com/

A Liberal Dose, April 29, 2021 "May Day, Labor, and the Reason We Need Unions"

 

A Liberal Dose, April 29, 2021

"May Day, Labor, and the Reason We Need Unions"

Troy D. Smith

Since it is almost May Day, I thought I would spend a couple of columns talking about the importance of labor, the labor movement, and unions. Some of you may wonder what that has to do with the first day of May. May 1 is recognized as Labor Day or International Workers Day by 103 countries around the world. Another half-dozen or so countries celebrate on the first Monday in May. The United States, of course, celebrates Labor Day in September –I think Canada is the only other country to go that route. This is ironic, since the events that led to May 1 being associated with the labor movement happened in the U.S. Next week I will tell you the story of what those events were, and why we celebrate the day in September here instead of May. This week I just want to introduce the topic by discussing why the labor movement was and still is so important.

First let’s talk a little bit about factories – a topic many of you out there are very familiar with. There used to be a lot of factories of various kinds in White County and throughout the Upper Cumberland. Most of them are gone, but several still remain and many of you –or your parents or grandparents- have worked in them. Factories as we know them became a thing in the U.S. during the Industrial Revolution, starting in the 1790s and lasting until roughly 1840. A second wave of factories –and huge changes in how they were run –occurred during the Second Industrial Revolution (roughly the end of the American Civil War in 1865 until the beginning of WWI in 1914).

During the first period, factory workers tended to fall into three categories: master craftsmen, journeymen, and apprentices (or beginners). A master craftsman knew from start to finish how to manufacture a given item and was an expert; journeymen were experienced hands, and apprentices were beginners. Workers labored in teams, called “gangs,” with the master as the “gang boss.” Each gang would build the item in question from scratch, the intermediate and beginner hands gradually learning the whole process. That started to change during the second period with the arrival of a guy named Frederick Winslow Taylor, the first modern “management consultant,” who introduced the concept of “scientific management.”

If your factory got “taylorized,” consultants would figure out exactly how long each step in production should take, and set production quotas. They also moved away from the “work gang” and “gang boss” model. Instead of a handful of workers having thorough knowledge of the process, each worker was trained how to do only one small step (which would lead to Henry Ford’s assembly line process). A master craftsman commanded a good wage, because he was irreplaceable –with scientific management, everyone became easily replaceable and their wages were depressed. The knowledge, and thus the power, rested with management instead of workers. That situation, plus the complete lack of government regulation, led to the period from 1870 to the early 1890s becoming known as “The Gilded Age,” implying that everything was not as shiny and good as it seemed on the surface. Income inequality got worse than ever. The poor kept growing poorer, and the rich richer, at a much faster clip than before. This led to the growth of the labor movement, which helped fuel the Populist Movement (when workers allied with farmers), which led to the Progressive Era. This was the age of “robber barons,” wealthy entrepreneurs who were regarded by many as deeply unscrupulous.  It was during this period -1870s/1880s –that bank and train robbers became romanticized folk heroes, because they were “sticking it to the man.” The same thing would happen during the Great Depression, with John Dillinger replacing Jesse James.

I demonstrate all that in class with the following activity. I announce that the classroom is a paper airplane factory, and I am the owner. I ask who knows how to make a paper airplane (it’s always less than half). I tell those students they are masters or journeymen and make $100 per day. The others are apprentices and earn $60. I then announce a contest: I will give a $500 bonus to whomever can make an airplane and successfully launch it the fastest. To ensure no one is cheating, I have management helpers closely monitor everyone –then I give the word, and they scramble to work. On the average, it takes about 11 seconds before the first airplane whizzes through the air. I congratulate the winner, tell him his check is in the mail, then inform him he is fired. So are all the $100 a day people –because we watched closely and saw, step-by-step, exactly how they made those airplanes. Now we have the knowledge, so they are expendable. In fact, they are dangerous. The other people –who don’t yet know how to make the airplanes –have their salaries reduced from $60 to $50. If they don’t like it they can quit. They will be easy to replace. Further, I now know that a paper airplane can be made in 11 seconds –so I expect each worker to produce one every 11 seconds, all day long, or I will dock their pay further.

I ask the students, if they had known me well enough to know I wasn’t trustworthy, what could they have done to change the outcome? Someone always figures out that all the workers could have made the planes slower, and/or launched them at the same time. “But how would you know to do that?”

The light comes on for them. They would have to organize. They would need a union.

You might need to go on strike, I tell them, so you would need a strike fund to live on in that eventuality. “How many of you, if you made $50 a day, would be willing to give $5 of it to your union as dues?” Out of 30 students, maybe 3 or 4 raise their hands. “This is why your union will fail,” I tell them, “and you will always lose.”

I inform them than in some states you are required to join, or at least contribute to, a union if your workplace has one. Other states (since 1948) are “right-to-work” states where you don’t have to join a union in order to work. Unions are mostly toothless in those states. I then show them a map of the states that have been right-to-work since the 40s. Then I show them a map of the states with the lowest wages and standard of living; the highest divorce rates, the lowest life expectancy; the most people on welfare and food stamps; the most people without insurance. It is pretty much the same map. After the economy collapsed in 2008, several Midwestern states joined the “right-to-work” club. Their wages and standards of living have gone down.

As President Obama put it, the term really means “right to work for less money.” And those other maps show the consequences over time, thereby demonstrating the importance of the labor movement.

Next time we will look more closely at its history.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A list of all previous columns can be found HERE

www.troyduanesmith.com