The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (34 page)

In the century and a half between 1750 and 1900, European population went from 140 to 430 million people. It had once represented 17 percent of the world’s people; now it had a quarter of them. The immediate causes of this dramatic increase in population came first from a drop in the death rate. During the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, better health, sanitation, and medicine extended life while mortality from age-old killers like cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, smallpox, and typhoid also abated. Enhanced fertility rates explain the long-term gain in population. In 1870, these dropped rather precipitously, but population continues to grow with rising life expectancy.

Overpopulation without matching economic development exacerbated ethnic tensions. Pogroms in Russia, Poland, and other Eastern European countries sent a large number of Jews to swell the tidal wave of immigrants washing on American shores between 1880 and 1914. Motives for leaving home ran the gamut from avoiding military service, fleeing taxes, hungering for adventure, getting higher wages, wanting land, or seeking political and religious freedom.
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Steamships sped up the trips while steerage rates remained low. This steady flow of cheap labor came at the right time for corporate America, which was de-skilling many jobs as it set up factory assembly lines.

Steel plants, oil refineries, sweat shops, and a myriad of factories beckoned from Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Youngstown, Toledo, and Newark to those who landed at Ellis Island. Most immigrants manned the factories, but some from Sweden and Norway went west to settle the newly opened land in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Women, depending upon the customs from their native Greece, Germany, or Ireland, took factory jobs, worked as servants, or stayed home making artificial flowers, hats, and clothes. For the latter group, the sewing machine was the key invention. Sometimes whole families toiled in their tenement apartments turned each morning after breakfast into miniworkshops.

These additional workers acted like an abundant supply of any element in production; it lowered prices—i.e., wages. In most American cities with populations of close to five hundred thousand, two-thirds of the people would be foreign born or had parents who were. Arriving in a country still run by WASPs, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of British and German descent, they became what were called hyphenated Americans, as in Polish-American or Italian-American, according to their country of origin.

Debating Capitalism’s Origins

Industrialization reshaped the working class. Members of a new proletariat reacted differently to the economic changes that were remapping their country. Industrialization had come more swiftly to Germany, Belgium, and France in the middle decades of the nineteenth century than to Great Britain and the United States. Its arrival assaulted customs whereas in the Anglo-American world the mechanization of the workplace began in the eighteenth century and spread slowly. Stretching over generations, this leisurely pace made it credible to think of industrialization as part of an evolutionary unfolding of their society’s natural potential for economic development, as Adam Smith had argued. Not so across the Channel. There critics saw industrialization as a rapacious transformation engineered by an upstart upper class eager to destroy both the aristocracy and the peasantry, which had once been protected from economic turbulence.

With a shared perspective on the disruption and exploitation of industrial capitalism, opponents multiplied rapidly. Differing more in what they recommended than in their understanding of the disaster that had hit Europe, they fell into large ideological groups. Syndicalists, especially strong in France, believed in organizing direct action like general strikes to wrest control of the workplace from owners. Because they wanted unions or syndicates of workers to be in charge, they got the name “syndicalists.” Anarchists wanted to abolish all government, arguing that government worked hand in glove with the industrialists. As their principal theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said, “Property is theft.” Here Proudhon was emphasizing the potent idea that private property was not natural but rather a device for confiscating the benefits of the industrial wealth that workers were actually creating. More idealistic than the others, anarchists looked to a future in which a kind of volunteer mutuality guided social decisions. Karl Marx had a more complicated theory about history itself: He saw industrialization as a stage in an inevitable progression to the socializing of the great wealth industrialists had created. For him, communism represented the final development in which government would be confined to the administration of things, not the rule of people.

These theories became the organizing principles behind proselytizing efforts. Working days of ten or twelve hours in six-day weeks at factories hazardous to health made men and women receptive to organizers. Campaigning for the eight-hour day came first. In 1864 the radicals and their followers founded the International Workingmen’s Association in London. Often called the First International, the IWA met annually in cities in Western Europe. It peaked with a membership of five million. Insurgencies in several European countries in 1848 had made governments particularly suspicious of labor agitation, so police and informers regularly attended labor gatherings.

Marx and Proudhon influenced each another, but they differed on the use of force. Proudhon believed that peaceful change was possible. The anarchists split from the Marxists in the First International, but later anarchists advocated violence in the service of social justice. With the array of radical explanations available, labor supporters differed on whether to form a political party to change government, join the Marxist wait for the overthrow of the capitalist system, or work within the system to spread the fruits of industrialization.

Labor Activists in Europe

The growth of radical groups alarmed leaders in the capitalized West. After two assaults on the life of Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1883, the German government outlawed all Social Democratic, Socialist, and Communist organizations. It renewed that law every three years. Unlike the United States, Germany had a tradition of social support, stemming from the paternalism of an earlier era. The draconian law about workers’ organization passed in the midst of an outburst of welfare legislation. In the words of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the propertyless classes must recognize that “the state is not only an institution of necessity but also one of welfare…serving their needs and interests.” Within a decade he had secured laws to insure workers against sickness, industrial accidents, old age, and incapacity. With employers charged for these programs, the insurance policies operated universally and efficiently.

The fear of labor unrest pushed manufacturers closer to, if not exactly into the arms of, the aristocratic Junkers while the menace of socialism prompted the Junker-dominated German government to champion social legislation that also slowed emigration from Germany.
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The German government spent generously on primary and secondary education. In a nourishing exchange of influences, industry profited from literate workers while industrial occupations animated workers to become politically active. Extending the suffrage was seen as a curb on radical effort to redistribute wealth. Despite the government’s outlawing of radical groups, support for the Social Democratic Party of Marxist lineage continued to grow.

More than half a million Englishmen and-women turned the old pagan holiday of May 1st into an international workers’ holiday when they marched to Hyde Park to demonstrate for the eight-hour day in 1890. In Latin America, labor unrest began in the second decade of the twentieth century. Syndicalists and anarchists in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay organized general strikes not just to secure gains for labor but to bring down the governments that colluded with bosses and landowners to maintain control over the working class. Even in the United States, the National Socialist Party, the Socialist Labor Party, the Farmer Labor Party, and the Communist Labor Party fielded candidates for elections in 1918 and 1920. Still, American workers did not take readily to radical ideas, preferring to work within the system to improve conditions and pay.

Germany and Great Britain saw powerful labor parties arise to compete with conservatives for political power. Following decades of struggle against the government and within the sprawling labor movement itself, English workers formed a labor party in 1900. Craft unions, representing the best-paid, best-educated part of the labor force, confined their activities to incremental improvements in wages and conditions. Unskilled workers who formed unions in the 1880s were much more aggressive, risking arrests and incarceration from their noisy public demonstrations for eight-hour workdays and safer conditions. They made the public look at the faces of women disfigured by the phosphorus they worked with in making matches. Not being able to restrict entry to their trade as the craft unions could, unskilled workers turned to strikes, picketing, and public marches to gain attention. Riots were not uncommon.

Buffeted by competition from Germany and the United States for their share in international markets, British industry fell on hard times. Job losses and stagnating wages became labor’s best recruiters. Prominent British intellectuals formed the Fabian Society to persuade the public to endorse such socialist measures as nationalizing major industries. Those who favored building a political movement won out. Within two decades the British Labour Party had displaced the Liberal Party as the principal rival of the Conservatives.

The Unique Struggle of American Labor

Labor’s situation differed strikingly in the United States. Without an aristocracy or even a recognized elite as in the colonial era, Americans felt themselves to be politically undifferentiated members of an embrasive democracy. Class distinctions, while evident, grated on Americans’ self-image. Even men without property got the vote during the nineteenth century, the Fourteenth Amendment securing it for African American men as well. Industrialization after the Civil War brought new opportunities to native-born white workers.
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As corporations took over from family owners and partnerships, business bureaucracies expanded. Native-born workers’ literacy and familiarity with American ways gave them a leg up, enabling many to exchange their blue collars for white ones. As clerks or supervisors they were able to move off the shop floor and into offices, where work was cleaner, the workday shorter, and the wages better. Like all Americans, they benefited from the steady stream of immigrants who came to take jobs in American factories because cheap labor kept the price of goods low. Farming also remained an option through most of the nineteenth century, even if the best land was gone. The actual number of farms in the United States increased until 1950, though the percentage of agricultural laborers steadily declined.

The plight of industrial workers worsened. As in Great Britain, skilled workers belonged to craft unions that focused on ensuring their privileges. Foreigners expanded the great pool of unskilled laborers who had few rights at the work site. Employers could fire them “at will…for good cause, no cause or even for cause morally wrong, without thereby being guilty of legal wrong.”
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American common law, following that of Great Britain, dealt with labor complaints under centuries-old master-servant statutes that were skewed in the master’s favor. The employer, for instance, was not responsible for an accident in the workplace if it had been caused by the negligence of a fellow worker. The law also construed labor unions as conspiratorial organizations, and foreign labor organizers were subject to deportation. Property rights trumped human rights consistently in court, despite measures favorable to workers passed into law. Unions did better during times of prosperity, when profit-happy employers were willing to make concessions.

Americans enthusiastically identified with the ideal of an egalitarianism citizenry and were generally indifferent to the great gaps in wealth among them. Foreign laborers strove to join the great middle group of their adopted country. Blacks constituted the most conspicuous exception to America’s commitment to assimilation. Once southern whites put in place after the Civil War the regime for segregating blacks and whites in schools, buses, and restaurants, they became obsessed with keeping African Americans “in their place.” An almost absolute social divide marked relations between the races, unlike anything in Europe. Of small comfort, this arrangement did provide opportunities for black entrepreneurs to bring goods and services to their communities.

The very distinctive ideology that dominated public discourse in the United States operated against organized labor. The public tended to view workers as individuals charged with taking care of themselves and their families. Thomas Jefferson made limited government a robust American value. As the champion of ordinary Americans Jefferson believed that curtailing federal power was the best way of shrinking the influence of a moneyed elite. The new concentration of power in industrial corporations undermined his assumptions, but it took a long time for the public to realize the need for a government equipped to monitor and curtail the great industrial enterprises. Populists, as the radicals were called, and the more cerebral Progressives, who followed in their reform path at the turn of the twentieth century, finally succeeded in alerting the public to the dangers of unchecked economic power.

Aroused, various disgruntled groups supplied the political muscle to get ameliorating legislation through Congress. They ranged from farmers dependent upon railroad companies to owners of small businesses threatened with being gobbled up by larger firms. Reform leaders among women exposed the wretched social environment in which immigrant families lived. Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, through their work in urban settlement houses, publicized the unsafe tenements and abusive employers that foreigners had to contend with. Drawing on the old anti-aristocratic rhetoric, turn-of-the-century reformers labeled the titans of industry “robber barons” and compared their highhanded ways with an aristocracy. It was a term with resonance in the United States because for so long the country had prided itself on not having a feudal past like Europe’s. The sprawling native-born white middle class also associated the often violent strikes and protests of the closing decades of the nineteenth century with European inspiration. Only slowly did labor win the favor of the public watching on the sidelines.