Industrial Revolution Created the Environment for Unionizing By Workers Who Felt Exploited
The brutal plight of urban workers during the industrial revolution through the 19th century was memorably depicted in Charles Dickens novels such as A Christmas Carol (the boss as greedy Scrooge), Oliver Twist (describing Victorian work houses) and David Copperfield (describing debtors prisons). It was far worse in Britain and Europe than in the U.S.
The US at this time was a mainly rural and agricultural society where labor organizing was impossible. Debtors prisons did not exist in the US after the 1840s, when they were outlawed by the passage of bankruptcy law. The Panic of 1837, lasting seven long years, “democratized bankruptcy protection and led to the abolition of debtors prisons.” (Source.)
As John Green noted in this Crash Course US History lecture, that changed after the civil war. “You know how when you’re studying history, and you’re reading along and everything seems safely in the past, and then BOOM you think, ‘Man, this suddenly seems very modern.’ For me, that moment in US History is the post-Reconstruction expansion of industrialism in America. After the Civil War, many of the changes in technology and ideas gave rise to this new industrialism. You’ll learn about the rise of Captains of Industry (or Robber Barons) like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller, and JP Morgan. You’ll learn about trusts, combinations, and how the government responded to these new business practices. All this, plus John will cover how workers reacted to the changes in society and the early days of the labor movement. You’ll learn about the Knights of Labor and Terence Powderly, and Samuel Gompers and the AFL” Transcript.
The first effective labor organization in the US was the Knights of Labor, organized just after the civil war in 1869.
“In the late 1870s and early 1880s, the United States had five times as many unionized workers as Germany, at a time when the two nations had similar populations,” wrote historian Michael Lind.
The Knights of Labor grew remarkably fast, but was damaged by the Haymarket Riot of 1886, in which a bomb killed seven police officers. Then, firing into the crowd, the police killed four strikers.
There was violence at the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 and the Pullman Rail Strike of 1894.
The Knights of Labor collapsed, but the more moderate American Federation of Labor took its place and grew quite powerful, well into the 1970s. It focused on pay, hours, and safety.
Capitalists spread the theory of Social Darwinism, or “survival of the fittest” applied not just to reptile and animal species but to humans and to businesses, and that corporations were people.
“Unions wanted citizens of the United States to imagine freedom more broadly, arguing that without a more equal economic system, America was becoming less, not more free, even as it became more prosperous,” Green says in the video. “If you’re thinking that this free-wheeling age of fast growth, uneven gains in prosperity, and corporate heroes/villains resembles the early 21st century, you’re not alone.” He urges listeners to think on how inequality could be the opposite of freedom.
Labor and Political Parties in the US
Unions developed strongly in the industrialized cities of the northern and mid-western United States, and initially unions were allied with the Republican Party of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft in the early 20th century.
Then, in the 1920s, the Republicans evolved into the party of big business, as epitomized by Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. “The business of America is business,” Coolidge proclaimed. Hoover spoke of his faith in the “high sense of moral responsibility in our business world.”
The Great Depression began in 1929, and the public’s faith in ever-expanding big business and unregulated free markets was shattered. Desperate workers and their unions
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