A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (91 page)

Gompers also kept American unions (in theory, at least) apolitical. This was common sense, given the small percentage of trade unionists in the country, who by 1880 accounted for less than 2.3 percent of the nonfarm labor force. For employees to have power, he believed, they had to be organized, strike infrequently (and only for the most significant of objectives), and maintain perfect discipline. Work stoppages in opposition to the introduction of new machinery not only were ineffective, but they also ran against the tide of history and human progress. In addition, uncoordinated strikes—especially when the unions had not properly prepared a war chest to see the members through the lean times—were worse than ineffective, posing the threat of destroying the union altogether. Gompers knew hardship first hand. In the 1877 strike, Gompers, with six children, pawned everything he had except his wife’s wedding ring, and the family “had nothing to eat but a soup of flour, water, salt, and pepper.”
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Even though that strike failed, it convinced Gompers more than ever that a unified and prepared union could succeed. Equally important, Gompers had accidentally hit upon the confederation structure, which allowed employees of new and evolving industries to join the organization essentially with equality to the established trades, thus allowing continued growth and development rather than a calcification around aging and soon-to-be obsolete enterprises.

What Gompers and his unions did not endorse were third-party movements, since he appreciated the winner-take-all/single-member-district structure of American politics. Specifically, for Gompers, that meant avoiding the new Populist movement, despite its appeals and the Populist leaders’ efforts at recruiting among the unions.

Raising Less Corn, and More Hell

Farm organization efforts began as early as 1867 with the founding of the Patrons of Husbandry, more popularly known as the Grangers. Grange chapters spread rapidly, gaining momentum until the Grange had a membership of 1.5 million by 1874. Originally seen as a means to promote farm cooperatives—facilitating the purchase and sales of other farmers’ products at lower prices—the Grange soon engaged in political lobbying on behalf of various regulations aimed at railroads and grain elevators. The Grangers managed to pass laws in five states that were challenged by the railroad and elevator owners, including the partners in a Chicago warehouse firm, Ira Y. Munn and George Scott, in the
Munn v. Illinois
case, where the Illinois Supreme Court held that the state legislature had broad powers to fix prices on everything from cab fares to bread prices.
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Munn and Scott were found guilty by an Illinois court of fixing prices, and Munn appealed, arguing that any arbitrary definition by the state about what constituted a maximum price violated the Constitution’s takings clause and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
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The Supreme Court held that states could regulate property for the public good under the police powers provisions if it could be shown that the enterprise in question benefited from its public context. Unfortunately, the court did not consider the state’s “evidence” that grain elevators had constituted a monopoly, and it ruled exclusively on the appeal of state authority to regulate.

The Grangers had already moved into a political activism that peaked with the election of 1880, and they soon faded, replaced by the Farmers’ Alliances. This movement emphasized similar cooperative efforts but also stressed mainstream political participation and organization. Led by a host of colorful characters, including Mary Elizabeth Lease, a Kansas schoolteacher and lawyer famous for her recommendation that farmers should “raise less corn, and more hell,” the Alliance sought to appeal to blacks to widen its base.
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White Southerners, however, never supported the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, and it disappeared within a few years. Meanwhile, every move to expand the appeal of the agrarians to one group, such as the freedmen, alienated other races or ethnic groups.

Despite the flamboyance of characters like Lease and Sockless Jerry Simpson, it was Charles W. Macune, the Alliance president, who formulated a genuine political plan of action.
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Macune advocated government loans monetized by the issue of new greenbacks or other types of government legal-tender notes, thus inflating the currency. The idea of inflation, either by the monetization of silver or through creation of new fiat money issued by the government, took on a life of its own as the end all of agrarian unrest. Farmers, sharecroppers, and any of the southern or western poor, for that matter, had become indoctrinated by pamphlets and incessant speeches that the solution to their problems was merely more money, with little instruction about the ramifications of money creation at the government level. William “Coin” Harvey, for example, in his popular book
Coin’s Financial School
(1894), offered a conspiratorial worldview of a money system controlled by sinister (often Jewish) bankers who, like the octopus (a favorite conspiracy symbol) had their tentacles throughout the international banking system.
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Other conspiracy-oriented books included
Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People
, by Sarah E. V. Emery (1887), and Mary Lease’s
The Problem of Civilization Solved
(1895), which raised the specter of both international banking cartels and racial pollution as the cause of American farmers’ plight.
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In these scenarios, the Rothschilds and other Jews of Europe, operating through a nebulous network in London (sometimes with the aid of the Bank of England and Wall Street), conspired to contract the money supply to benefit the lending classes.
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The developments surrounding the silver and money issue in the late nineteenth century originated with an international deflation that set in during the 1870s, but were in no way the work of the Rothschilds or other allegedly nefarious groups. These international forces were largely hidden from domestic critics and inflationists, who thought that increasing wage levels allowed them to pay back fixed debts with increasingly cheap dollars. (They ignored the fact that all other prices rise, and that although mortgages may stay constant, the price of seed, tools, farm implements, clothing, and fuel increases, eating up whatever savings are “gained” through the temporary artificial advantage in the mortgage payments.) Nevertheless, at the time, the postbellum policies of the U.S. government appeared to cause agrarian and labor distress.

It began with Congress’s 1873 decision not to monetize silver but to resume redemption of the Civil War–era greenbacks in 1879, putting the country on a de facto gold standard. This followed a decade’s worth of increased silver production, originating with the Comstock Lode in 1859, that had changed the ratio of exchange between silver and gold. Gold became more expensive, but the cheaper, more abundant silver was more widely available. This seemed to offer an opportunity for government action: if the government could be forced to purchase silver at fixed prices (higher than the market price) and coin it, silver miners would receive artificial price increases, and new silver coins would flood the West and South, providing a solution (it was thought) to the money question. When Congress rejected this scenario, silverites labeled the action the crime of ’73.

Meanwhile, the Treasury, under John Sherman, had carefully accumulated enough gold that the resumption occurred smoothly. Prior to the resumption, pressures from westerners and southerners to counteract the slow deflation that had gripped the economy led to calls for new issues of greenbacks. Alliance-related greenbackers even succeeded in electing forty-four congressmen sympathetic to the movement and four pro-Alliance governors in the years preceding 1892. The farmers increasingly found their calls for regulation and control of business drowned out by a larger new coalition of westerners and southerners who wanted the monetization of silver as the cure to all agrarian ills.

Since the early 1870s, worldwide deflationary pressures had forced prices down. Farm prices fell more than others, or so it seemed. Actually, it depended entirely on the crop as to whether prices genuinely dropped or stayed relatively even with other products. Despite the roundly criticized “crime,” the U.S. government had little impact on the price level, except when it came to bank notes. Since the Civil War, national banks had been the sole sources of note issue in the United States. That meant that notes tended to be more plentiful where there were many national banks, and less so where there were fewer. Both the South and the West were at a disadvantage in that case, the South because the comptroller of the currency was unlikely to give a bank charter to either former Confederates or freedmen, and the West because of the sparse population. Each region clamored for more money.

When the western silver mines proved richer than even the original prospectors had dreamed, both regions saw silver as a means to address the shortfall. In 1878, Richard “Silver Dick” Bland of Missouri and William Allison of Iowa introduced a measure for “free and unlimited coinage of silver” at a ratio of sixteen silver ounces for one gold ounce. Fearing a veto from President Hayes, Allison introduced amendments that limited the total silver purchased to $4 million per month at market prices. Allison’s amendments essentially took the teeth from the bill by robbing it of its artificial advantages for the holders of silver. Nevertheless, it reflected the new West/South coalition around “free silver,” meaning the purchase of all the western silver that could be mined, and its coinage at the inflated rate of sixteen ounces of silver to every ounce of gold. This was stated in the parlance of the day as sixteen to one, when the real relationship between silver and gold was seventeen to one. Put another way, silverites would be subsidized at taxpayers’ expense.

By Cleveland’s time, the federal mints had coined 215 million silver dollars, with more than three quarters of them in government vaults and only $50 million in actual circulation. Meanwhile, as miners hauled more silver in to exchange for gold, the government saw its gold supply dwindle steadily. Had the government circulated all the silver coins, it would not have produced prosperity, but inflation. Prices on existing goods would have gone up, but there would have been no new incentive to produce new goods. Instead, a different problem arose: the government had to pay gold to its creditors (mostly foreign) but had to accept the less valuable silver from its debtors. Congress formed into two camps, one around free silver, intending to increase the silver purchases and push for full bimetallism, and another around the gold standard. Cleveland was in the latter group. With a hostile president, and enough goldbugs in the House and Senate to prevent veto overrides, the silver issue stalled throughout the remainder of Cleveland’s term, but it would resurface with a vengeance under Harrison.

Shame of the Cities

While farmers agitated over silver, another large group of people—immigrants—flooded into the seaport cities in search of a new life. Occasionally, they were fleeced or organized by local politicians when they arrived. Often they melted into the American pot by starting businesses, shaping the culture, and transforming urban areas. In the process the cities lost their antebellum identities, becoming true centers of commerce, arts, and the economy, as well as hotbeds of crime, corruption and degeneracy—“a serious menace to our civilization,” warned the Reverend Josiah Strong in 1885.
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The cities, he intoned, were “where the forces of evil are massed,” and they were under attack by “the demoralizing and pauperizing power of the saloons and their debauching influence in politics,” not to mention the population, whose character was “so largely foreign, [and where] Romanism finds its chief strength.”
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The clergyman probably underestimated the decay: in 1873, within three miles of New York’s city hall, one survey counted more than four hundred brothels housing ten times that number of prostitutes.
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Such illicit behavior coincided with the highest alcohol consumption levels since the turn of the century, or a quart of whiskey a week for every adult American.

Some level of social and political pathology was inevitable in any population, but it was exacerbated by the gigantic size of the cities. By the 1850s, the more partisan of the cities, especially New York and Boston, achieved growth in spite of the graft of the machines and the hooliganism. New York (the largest American city after 1820), Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston emerged as commercial hubs, with a second tier of cities, including New Orleans, Cincinnati, Providence, Atlanta, Richmond, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland developing strong urban areas of their own. But New York, Boston, Chicago, and New Orleans, especially, also benefited from being regional money centers, further accelerating their influence by bringing to the cities herds of accountants, bankers, lawyers, and related professionals.

By the mid-1800s, multistory buildings were commonplace, predating the pure skyscraper conceived by Louis Sullivan in 1890. Even before then, by mid-century two-story developments and multiuse buildings done in the London style had proliferated. These warehouses and factories soon yielded to larger structures made of brick (such as the Montauk buildings of Chicago in 1882) or combinations of masonry hung on a metal structure. Then, after Andrew Carnegie managed to produce good cheap steel, buildings were constructed out of that metal. More than a few stories, however, required another invention, the electric safety-brake-equipped elevator conceived by Elisha Otis. After Otis demonstrated his safety brake in 1887, tall buildings with convenient access proliferated, including the Burnham & Root, Adler & Sullivan, and Holabird & Roche buildings in Chicago, all of which featured steel frames. Large buildings not only housed businesses, but also entertainments: the Chicago Auditorium (1890) was ten stories high and included a hotel. After 1893 the Chicago city government prohibited buildings of more than ten stories, a prohibition that lasted for several decades.