trolled by the unions.[1] The dark pictures painted by the labor leaders of the decade should be studied.
Absorbed in the task of getting large dividends, the employer seldom inquired of his superintendent how he managed the business intrusted to his keeping, or how he treated the employees. In thousands of places throughout the United States, as many superintendents, foremen or petty bosses are interested in stores, corner groceries or saloons. In many places the employee is told plainly that he must deal at the store, or get his liquor from the saloon in which his boss has an interest; in others he is given to understand that he must deal in these stores or saloons, or forfeit his situation.[2]
Worse conditions never existed in any industry in this country than those of the Hocking Valley region of Ohio in 1884. Slavery was heaven compared with what the miners of the Hocking Valley had to endure.[3]
A new era was in the making; and the wage earners were being prepared for more definite and firm organization. But it was also a period in which capitalism was becoming strong and immigration was multiplying. The old individualistic ideals were still generally accepted; and were not displaced without much social friction. Strikes were of frequent occurrence and the boycott a popular weapon.
The fall and winter of 1884 will long be remembered by men active in the labor movement at that time as a period of great stress. Strikes and lockouts were prevalent as never before in this country, and labor was often a heavy loser. Capitalism was beginning to look upon the militia as its natural ally, and labor was not sufficiently well organized to make politicians who had charge of the state machinery respect or fear its power.[4]
What is the spectacle presented to our view? Crime reaching a magnitude it never did before; poverty increasing with frightful rapidity; intense and steadily increasing competition with labor in nearly every vocation of industry; an army of idlers crowding upon the workers everywhere; the man who is driven by necessity or want to work or die of starvation is compelled to fight his own fellows or be guarded by the police in the discharge of his duties. A decrepit, homeless humanity, swelling in numbers every day, audible groans of want, woe and misery coming up from every mining, manufacturing and commercial district, and from many agricultural districts throughout the civilized world. Strikes on every hand and general discontent prevailing.[5]
Finally, what would to-day be called "direct action" was advocated, and the Haymarket Square episode followed. The decade of the eighties was an era of capitalistic combination in the form of "pools"; but the spirit of solidarity among the wage earners was still very weak. The "separating influences of shops in one town, theories about general principles, language, nationality, or the division of labor, split the workers on one and the same product into bickering factions."[6]
- ↑ Cherouny, "The Historical Development of the Labor Question," pp. 240–244.
- ↑ Powderly in "Labor: Its Rights and Wrongs" (1886). Also, in North American Review, May, 1886.
- ↑ Buchanan, "The Story of a Labor Agitator."
- ↑ Ibid., p. 128.
- ↑ Morgan, "History of the Wheel and Alliance," p. 662 (1889).
- ↑ Cherouny, "The Historical Development of the Labor Question."
