LABOR

Between the Civil War and World War I, the United States experienced great economic changes, ultimately emerging as an industrial power. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era saw business giants achieving unparalleled wealth, while in the cities, factories, farms, and mines, Americans' worst nightmares of poverty and degradation became reality. The tumultuous and often bloody relationship between the business magnates and a burgeoning labor movement continually shocked and fascinated the American public. On the streets, in the pulpit, and in a variety of literary forms, Americans debated the rights of the worker and the social responsibilities of business, government, and the church. In short, as Alan Trachtenberg writes, these debates "took the appearance of struggles over the meaning of the term 'America'" (p. 73).

CAPITAL AND LABOR

With the mobilization of the Civil War, the United States began its shift from a small-scale agricultural and manufacturing economy to one dominated by massive industrial corporations. The emergence of the railroads played an important role in this transformation. In 1869 the first transcontinental railroad was completed. Over the next decades railroads helped increase the settlement of the West, providing transportation for settlers and the goods they produced and consumed. The rail boom also fueled the steel, iron, and coal industries. Meanwhile gold and silver mines proliferated, particularly in the West.

These large-scale industries required unprecedented amounts of capital. Corporations, used primarily in the antebellum era for financing large state-associated projects such as bridges and banks, became the major vehicles for private investment, soon emerging as a dominant force in the economic and social landscape. Although the corporation is by definition a conglomeration of people invested in a common enterprise, the great corporations the Gilded Age came to be identified with powerful individuals such as J. P. Morgan (banking), Andrew Carnegie (steel), Jay Gould (rail), and John D. Rockefeller (oil and coal). These men were known as the "robber barons," men whose notoriously ruthless competition led to virtual monopolies in their respective industries. Rockefeller (1839–1937) pioneered corporate consolidation, or "vertical integration." His Standard Oil Company took control of every step of production, transportation, and marketing, even making and selling the products that used his oil. Control of the rails enabled Rockefeller to ship his own oil at a discounted rate, and his efficient marketing system allowed him to cut prices so low that his competitors were forced to capitulate. Another corporate development was the "company town," a settlement populated by workers at the local factory, which owned all of the town's housing and businesses. By controlling wages, rents, and the price of goods, owners could keep their workers in perpetual debt to the company. Sometimes industrialists, instead of competing with each other, set up pools and trusts, sharing monopolies and cornering markets. Although the robber barons were reviled by their competitors and employees, they were also admired by much of the American public for their business acuity, rugged individualism, and philanthropy.

With the emergence of industry came a shift in the composition of the labor force. Ten million immigrants came to the United States between 1873 and 1897. Before 1880 northern and western Europe provided the bulk of immigrants; however, after 1880 many more came from southern and eastern European countries. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) notwithstanding, Chinese immigration accounted for the majority of migrant farm laborers in the 1880s and 1890s. Although many immigrants came to America intending to return to Europe, most stayed, and while many immigrants were able to move up the economic ladder, many more remained in unskilled jobs.

Wage laborers often faced long hours and dangerous working conditions. The railroad industry was particularly hazardous, with two hundred on-the-job fatalities recorded yearly between 1890 and 1910. Workers were often subject to wage cuts, which were frequently used to finance ruinous price wars. Overproduction led to numerous recessions and depressions. In addition to creating massive unemployment, these economic downturns enhanced the consolidation of large industries, driving out the weaker companies and strengthening the positions of the robber barons.

"THE MAN WITH THE HOE"

Edwin Markham's (1852–1940) famous poem "The Man with the Hoe" (1899) was inspired by Jean-François Millet's painting The Man with a Hoe, which depicts an exhausted laborer leaning on his hoe in an empty field.

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.

Who made him dead to rapture and despair,

A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,

Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?

Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?

Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave

To have dominion over sea and land;

To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;

To feel the passion of Eternity?

Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns

And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?

Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf

There is no shape more terrible than this—

More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed—

More filled with signs and portents for the soul—

More frought with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!

Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him

Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?

What the long reaches of the peaks of song,

The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?

Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;

Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;

Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,

Plundered, profaned and disinherited,

Cries protest to the Judges of the World,

A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

Is this the handiwork you give to God,

This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?

How will you ever straighten up this shape;

Touch it again with immortality;

Give back the upward looking and the light;

Rebuild in it the music and the dream;

Make right the immemorial infamies,

Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

How will the future reckon with this Man?

How answer his brute question in that hour

When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?

How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—

With those who shaped him to the thing he is—

When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,

After the silence of the centuries?

The Little Book of Modern Verse, edited by Jessie B. Rittenhouse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), pp. 116–118.

EARLY LABOR ORGANIZATION

Early efforts to organize workers faced challenges from business and government as well as from class conflict and ethnic tensions among the laborers themselves. For years corporations enjoyed the support of government against the demands of labor, partially due to the notorious corruption of Gilded Age politics but mostly because of a dominant laissez-faire (hands off) philosophy of political economy. Grounded in Adam Smith's free market ideology and supported by Herbert Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism, the government and public believed that in business competition the fittest would survive, creating wealth and prosperity for the deserving and progress for the human race. Within this theoretical framework, a series of laws and court decisions entitled corporations to the same protections as citizens under the Constitution, authorized corporations to create their own police forces, and banned not only strikes but also union organization. Corporations also exploited the ethnic tensions among workers, particularly during the "new immigration." Poles, Slavs, and Italians as well as African Americans were often excluded from unions and denied access to the skilled trades. When workers went on strike, the company owners hired blacks and immigrants as strikebreakers, or "scabs," in their place. The presence of scabs, often protected by armed detectives, frequently led to violence. Jay Gould (1836–1892) once bragged, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half " (Murolo and Chitty, p. 111).

The first attempt at organizing skilled and unskilled workers in a national union was the National Labor Union (NLU), formed in 1866. Cooperating with the Colored National Labor Union (founded 1869), the NLU agitated for working-class solidarity (despite its exclusion of women and the Chinese) and the eight-hour day. Although neither the NLU nor the CNLU survived the depression of 1873, local organization continued, and the 1870s saw strikes and demonstrations occurring with growing frequency. In January 1874, twenty-five thousand workers and unemployed demonstrated in New York City's Tompkins Square, resulting in a riot when mounted police attempted to disperse the protesters. A secret society known as the Molly Maguires was implicated in a variety of terrorist acts in the Pennsylvania mines, ranging from sabotage to assassination. In 1877 a series of rail strikes across the nation became known as the "Great Uprising." Beginning with a strike against the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to protest wage cuts, the strike spread across the country. As militias were called in to quell the uprising, riots flared up in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis. Ultimately the National Guard and federal troops intervened; by the end of the uprising, the death toll exceeded one hundred. Newspaper accounts of the strikes and riots sparked fears of anarchy, evoking the French Commune of 1871.

In the wake of the Great Uprising of 1877, a secret organization called the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor went public. The Knights of Labor (KOL) was founded as a garment workers union, but by the time of its emergence from secrecy, the organization included a variety of trades. After its initial leader, Uriah Stephens, stepped down, the machinist and mayor of Scranton Terence Powderly (1849–1924, mayor 1878–1884) took the reins. The KOL became the most powerful labor organization of the Gilded Age, claiming 750,000 members in 1886. Known for being the most inclusive U.S. labor organization of the nineteenth century, the KOL admitted women, immigrants, and blacks. Its political message was against monopoly and the entire wage-labor system, advocating instead the "cooperative commonwealth." Organizing producer and consumer cooperatives as well as social and educational programs, the KOL supported hundreds of strikes and sympathy strikes, its greatest victory coming against Jay Gould's southwestern rail lines in 1885.

Events in 1886 and 1887 dramatically reversed the fortunes of the KOL. After Gould, with the support of lawmen, crushed a February 1886 strike, the KOL organized a national strike for the eight-hour day. Beginning on 1 May, about 350,000 workers struck, including 65,000 in Chicago. On 3 May, Chicago police fired on workers picketing outside the McCormick Harvester Works, killing four. Chicago anarchists called for a protest at Haymarket Square for the following night. As the demonstration was winding down, police arrived to disperse the crowd; at that point, someone (it was never determined who) threw a bomb into their ranks, killing eight and wounding sixty more. The fallout from the Haymarket affair was devastating to the labor movement. Chicago activists were rounded up in massive sweeps. Eight anarchists were ultimately arrested and convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, although only two of the defendants were actually present when the explosion occurred. More so than the Great Uprising of 1877, the Haymarket episode polarized the nation. Newspapers and magazines followed the trial and subsequent execution of four of the defendants. Social activists and trade unionists denounced the proceedings and appealed for clemency, while many others denounced the labor movement. Powderly attempted to distance the KOL from the Haymarket Eight and tried to quell militancy in the organization as a whole. This led to a series of conflicts with local unions, as a series of unauthorized strikes created rifts between the national organization and individual chapters. Powderly was ousted in 1893, and by 1896 the KOL's membership had dwindled to twenty thousand.

LABOR AND CAPITAL RECONFIGURED

After the Haymarket affair, a new national labor organization supplanted the KOL, the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Led by the cigar maker Samuel Gompers (1850–1924), the AFL took a markedly different approach from the KOL, called "pure and simple craft unionism." Instead of fighting the wage-labor system, the AFL focused on tangible rewards for its members, such as shortened hours or higher pay in specific industries. Rather than attempting to be all-inclusive, the AFL was mostly made up of highly skilled workers, who had a stronger position in the workplace and tended to be white and male. By 1892 forty national unions were affiliated with the AFL, including the United Mine Workers and the United Garment Workers. In its first four years the AFL staged over seventy-five hundred strikes and utilized sympathy strikes effectively, winning the eight-hour day for the Brotherhood of Carpenters with a national strike on 1 May 1890. But a crushing defeat of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, an AFL affiliate, not only showed the limitations of the AFL but also added a dark chapter to the nation's history.

When the contract between Amalgamated employees at Carnegie's steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, expired in 1892, the mill manager, Henry Frick, announced that the new union contract, to go into effect that July, would cut union wages by an average of 22 percent. The Amalgamated rejected the new contract, and on 30 June, Frick locked out the union members and replaced them with scabs. The unskilled workers at Homestead and the local government rallied to the union's defense, and when armed guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency arrived to escort the strikebreakers, fierce fighting erupted. A daylong battle on 6 July repulsed the Pinkertons, leaving three Pinkertons and seven workers dead. On 12 July the eight thousand members of the Pennsylvania militia arrived to protect the mill and the strikebreakers, and the mill reopened. By November the union was broken.

On the same day that the Pennsylvania militia intervened in Homestead, federal troops moved on Couer d'Alene, Idaho, where striking mine workers had clashed with armed scabs. In the initial battle both strikers and scabs suffered casualties, and a crusher mill was destroyed. Although this episode was overshadowed by the Homestead strike, it further served to disconcert both labor activists and the American public.

A deep depression beginning in spring 1893 provided the background for one of the more innovative labor protests, Coxey's Army. Since 1892, the Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey (1854–1951) had been lobbying Congress for a federal highway program, which would provide work for the unemployed as well as improve the nation's infrastructure. Forming a group called the Commonweal of Christ, Coxey and the itinerant lecturer Carl Browne drafted a petition supporting the project and organized a mass march of the unemployed on Washington, D.C., to deliver the petition personally. In spring 1894 news of the march reached the national press, and recruits began to gather across the country, as far west as California and Washington State. Coxey and Browne left Coxey's Ohio home with two hundred marchers on Easter Sunday and reached Washington, D.C., in five weeks. The march was a media event, with a press corps traveling alongside the marchers. Meanwhile the western contingents had a series of run-ins with the railroad and militias; some were arrested and returned home. A young Jack London traveled for a short time with a group that had originated in San Francisco. On 1 May, International Labor Day, Coxey's Army paraded through the streets of Washington, D.C., but his army clashed with police and the leaders. As the western contingents arrived, the Coxeyites moved to camps in Maryland and Virginia. Soon money and food ran out, and media attention shifted elsewhere. Congress ignored Coxey's proposal, and the camps were raided and dispersed in August by state militias.

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

At the turn of the century the labor movement suffered both from failed strikes and new corporate strategies. A particularly violent strike by American Railway Union members at the Pullman Palace Car Company left twenty-five civilians dead and its leaders in jail. Meanwhile American industrial productivity was bolstered by a new management philosophy known as Taylorism, or "scientific management." Frederick Taylor (1856–1915), an engineer and manager at the Midvale Steel Works, analyzed his workers' tasks, timing each motion and determining the most efficient way to complete each task. Breaking down long, complicated tasks into shorter repetitive ones that unskilled workers could perform, Taylor standardized plant operations. He began publishing the results of his Midvale experiments in 1895; soon Taylorism was widely popular among employers. Taylorism's appeal lay in its effects on both plant efficiency and unions. Not only could companies replace craftsmen with lesser-paid unskilled workers, but skilled workers also lost a valuable bargaining chip—their intimate technical knowledge of their jobs—to managers and engineers. The decreased status of the skilled worker made strikes and unions harder to sustain. Meanwhile corporations organized against labor. In 1903 the National Association of Manufacturers launched the open shop drive, compiling blacklists of labor activists and distributing antiunion literature.

These setbacks created dissent in the labor movement. The Socialist Party, led by the former American Railway Union leader Eugene Debs (1855–1926), advocated a more militant and expansive approach than the AFL's "pure and simple craft unionism." The Socialists ran political campaigns in an effort to redesign the social order, and although many members of the AFL were Socialists, Gompers discouraged their activities. In 1905 a number of Socialists broke off from the AFL and formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW (whose members were known as "Wobblies") reached out to the unskilled workers who were excluded by the AFL. Of the major labor organizations, the IWW was best known for prolific songwriting. The Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, whose verse celebrated the workingman, was an IWW cardholder.

The IWW gained national attention with a victory in Lawrence, Massachusetts. When the owners of the American Woolen Company cut wages, mill workers went on strike, attacking the scabs and sabotaging the factory. The AFL textile union, representing a minority of the workers, attempted to suppress the strike, so the strikers turned to the IWW. The organization helped strikers defy injunctions against picketing by creating moving picket lines and arranged for the children of strikers to be sent to safe havens in New York and Philadelphia. When police attacked mothers who were putting children on outbound trains, public opinion was indignant. Congress investigated the mills, and the strike ultimately succeeded.

Women played significant roles in several strikes in the years preceding World War I. In 1909 female workers in New York City's garment industry led a successful strike. The following year, the Chicago garment worker Hannah Shapiro led a strike against Hart, Schaffner, and Marx which spread across the city, ultimately encompassing over forty thousand workers. Mary "Mother" Jones (1830–1930) lectured and raised funds for labor activity over the course of decades. She supported Coxey's Army in the 1890s and was present at one of the bloodiest battles of the labor struggle, in Ludlow, Colorado.

Striking miners had left Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron works in September 1913 and set up a tent colony. Months of small confrontations between the strikers, the scab workers, and the state militia ensued. The standoff exploded on 20 April 1914, when the militia burned down the tent colony, killing three workers, eleven children, and two women. Armed unionists descended on Ludlow, and by the time federal troops had restored order, sixty-six miners or their family members had been killed. Although the strikers were defeated, shortly thereafter Congress passed the Clayton Act, which formally legalized unions and barred injunctions against peaceful strikes.

As the United States entered World War I the labor movement seemed to be making progress. Although the IWW refused to support the war, Samuel Gompers committed the AFL and its member unions to the war effort. Not only did the war give the AFL the opportunity to demonstrate labor's patriotism to a skeptical public, the shortage of labor and the industrial needs placed labor in an advantageous bargaining position. More strikes occurred during the war than in any two-year period before, but they were often resolved quickly and to the strikers' advantage.

After the war the situation soured very quickly for the labor movement. Antiwar groups such as the Socialist Party and IWW had already suffered repression as the government sought to root out disloyalty, particularly among recent immigrants. The fall of Russia to the communists brought a red scare to the United States, and soon the IWW was crushed. Returning veterans increased the labor pool while industrial output slowed, and the working classes divided along racial lines. In 1919 race riots flared in St. Louis and Chicago, and the Ku Klux Klan flourished in both North and South. Also that year, a general strike in Seattle and a strike by the Boston police not only failed but also aroused public opposition to unionism in general. In the 1920s government legislation and widespread racketeering further weakened unions; not until the Great Depression would the labor movement regain national significance.

LABOR IN THE LITERATURE OF THE GILDED AGE

In much of the literature and rhetoric of the Gilded Age, a republican ideology predominated, hailing the virtues of work and the importance of labor to the moral foundation of America and its citizens. Writers of success literature such as Horatio Alger (1832–1899) promoted honest labor as necessary for material and moral self-improvement. Union leaders echoed Alger's sentiments, grounding their appeals for fair treatment in rhetoric championing the dignity of labor and laborers. Furthermore, argued the KOL in its Declaration of Principles, by offering workers "sufficient leisure in which to develop their intellectual, moral, and social faculties" (Sorge, p. 253), a shortened workday would help create a stronger citizenry.

As strikes became more prevalent, writers disagreed on the cause of labor discontent. Alger often expressed sympathy for laborers attempting to organize. Many, however, saw the labor movement as the product of criminals and con men. Such is the case in John Hay's (1838–1905) The Bread-Winners (1883), set in a fictional Lake Erie city during the Great Uprising. The "Bread-Winners" are a fictional labor organization headed by the "professional reformer" Andrew Jackson Offitt. Offitt corrupts the slow-witted carpenter Sam Sleeny, convincing him to join the Bread-Winners by getting him drunk and stoking his jealousy over a girl. During the strikes, Sam, Offitt, and the Bread-Winners attempt to loot the mansions of Algonquin Avenue, in particular that of Captain Farnham, Sam's supposed rival for Maud Matchin. Captain Farnham and his militia of Civil War comrades are portrayed as heroic, defending not only Farnham's home but that of the beautiful Alice Belding and her widowed mother. More important than the bravery of Farnham's militia is the contrast between Farnham's gentility and the Bread-Winners' crudeness. As Sam meets the brotherhood for the first time, he recognizes "the laziest and most incapable workmen in town—men whose weekly wages were habitually docked for drunkenness, late hours, and botchy work" (p. 118). Offitt's character is exposed after he frames Sam for robbery and assault and tries to run away with Maud himself. After being acquitted of Offitt's murder by a verdict of "justifiable homicide," Sam returns to his old position, marrying Maud. Thus The Bread-Winners restores Sam to an understanding of his proper station, affirming the social order and relegating labor discontent to the grumbling of the shiftless and manipulative con men. Yet Hay's description of life after the strike is ominous. "The rich and prosperous people," he writes, "gave no thought to the questions which had come so near to an issue of fire and blood" (p. 229). Instead they "kept on making money, building fine houses, and bringing up children to hate politics as they did, in fine to fatten themselves as sheep which should be mutton whenever the butcher was ready" (p. 229).

UTOPIAN RESPONSES

Increased strikes and riots throughout the 1880s, culminating in the Haymarket bombing, seemed to confirm Hay's sense of foreboding. In the wake of Haymarket, however, several influential writers took a more sympathetic view of the labor movement. Edward Bellamy, William Dean Howells, and Albion Tourgée penned utopian novels, imagining a variety of solutions to the labor crisis.

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898), a former newspaper editor with a lifelong passion for reform, set the standard for American utopian fiction with Looking Backward (1888). The novel was arguably the most influential American book in the last decades of the nineteenth century, sparking "Bellamy clubs" dedicated to social reform across the nation. The novel imagines America in the year 2000, when the state has taken control of the economy. Julian West, who has fallen asleep in 1887, awakens in the future, where he receives a tour and detailed description of the utopia. By taking over all industry and making employees of its citizens, the United States has applied "the principle of military service . . . to the labor question" (p. 58). In the Industrial Army, "service of the nation, patriotism, [and] passion for humanity" impel "the workers as in [the nineteenth century] they did the soldier" (p. 79). Meanwhile competition has been eliminated, not only in the domestic marketplace but also among nations, making for a peaceful and prosperous world.

Bellamy appeals to the power of science to create the perfect society. West's guide marvels that Americans of Bellamy's time could "fail to compare the scientific manner in which the nation went to war with the unscientific manner in which it went to work" (p. 212). In Bellamy's utopia the state determines the levels of production and is responsible for assigning workers the jobs for which they are best suited. While Looking Backward inspired the social scientists of the Progressive Era, Bellamy's rigidly structured utopia also eerily anticipates the "scientific management" developed by Frederick Taylor to promote the interests of business.

One devoted fan of Looking Backward was William Dean Howells (1837–1920). Already a famous author and editor by the mid-1880s, Howells had encountered harsh criticism by publicly protesting the Haymarket trial. In his 1890 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, debates about the labor problem occupy major portions and precipitate the central crisis of the story, when the socialist agitator Berthold Lindau insults the owner of the periodical that employs the main characters. Engaging both Lindau and the capitalist Dryfoos are former Confederate Colonel Woodburn, who advocates a return to slavery, and Dryfoos's son Conrad, a would-be minister with labor sympathies. The arguments are mediated by Basil March, the editor of Every Other Week, who struggles with the labor question throughout the novel.

Critics generally agree that March functions as a stand-in for Howells, though there is debate about the extent to which the author identifies with Lindau. Some critics have argued that by presenting Lindau's arguments in German dialect, Howells marks him as a foreigner and his doctrines as un-American. Yet Howells markedly updates Hays's depiction of labor activists. Lindau may be a boor, but he is no crude con man. Rather, he is a Union army veteran who lost an arm in the war, translates European literature for the periodical, and moves out of his Greenwich Village apartment because he found he "was begoming a lidtle too moch of an aristograt" (pp. 164–165). March's social consciousness is shaped not only by Lindau but also by his own labor experiences. The offer of a "promotion" at his insurance firm to a position with a lower salary encourages March to take the editor's job of Every Other Week, where he must face the decision either to fire Lindau or be fired himself. Although these experiences do not lead March to adopt Lindau's radicalism, they demonstrate that even the middle class is subject to the dictates of the labor market.

The characters Conrad Dryfoos and Margaret Vance introduce Howells's interest in Christian socialism. This movement attempted to revise a predominant version of Christianity that linked poverty and vice, considering wealth a sign of God's election. Christian socialists drew on the image of Jesus as the friend of the poor and cited the communal lifestyle of the apostles to argue that Christ was a proto-socialist. In 1890 the novelist Albion Tourgée (1838–1905) published Murvale Eastman, Christian Socialist, in which Reverend Eastman risks losing his congregation and his love by preaching this new doctrine. According to Eastman, the function of the church "is to be, not the controller, but the main-spring of civilization; to see to it that in government, in business, in society, the underlying impulse is that which is enjoined for the regulation of human life, 'Bear ye another's burdens'" (p. 272). In Hazard, Conrad and Margaret, two members of the upper class, minister to the poor and sympathize with the railway workers who strike at the end of the novel. Conrad functions in the novel as a Christ figure; his death during the strike serves as the catalyst for his father's redemption.

The rail strike provides the most intense action of the novel. Like Hay, Howells uses the strike both as a metaphor for the class war and as a warning about the national failure to address the labor issue. However, the policeman who fatally beats Lindau does not represent order and chivalry like Captain Farnham but "irresponsible and involuntary authority" (p. 368). Ultimately Howells's solution to the labor crisis lies not in revolutionary violence but in the literary project Every Other Week, where the contributors share in the magazine's profits.

RAKING THE MUCK

At the turn of the century a new breed of writers developed and refined a journalistic tradition that exposed the horrors of industrial labor. Police reporter Jacob Riis (1849–1914) toured the tenements of New York, gathering the material for a series of articles that resulted in the 1890 best-seller How the Other Half Lives. While Riis's primary interest is the deplorable housing conditions in New York's slums, the book also details the conditions of the Ludlow Street sweatshops and describes the lives of Bohemian cigar makers working seventeen hours a day for $15.50 per week. In the 1890s McClure's Magazine specialized in this type of investigative journalism, later called "muckraking," providing pieces such as Stephen Crane's (1871–1900) "In the Depths of a Coal Mine" (August 1894). Crane's vivid descriptions elicit sympathy for the laborers, which include children "yet at the spanking period" (p. 157). The article seeks to spark outrage at the mine, "imperturbably cruel and insatiate, black emblem of greed," as well as at "the gods of this labor" (p. 163).

Realistic treatments of factory work, strikes, and unemployment form integral sections of Sister Carrie (1900) by Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945). Carrie Meeber's experiences at the Chicago shoe factory are pure drudgery. "Not the slightest provision had been made for the comfort of the employees," writes Dreiser, "the idea being that something was gained by giving them as little and making the work as hard and unremunerative as possible" (p. 41). Although Carrie is able to escape this sort of labor for a life on the New York stage, her onetime lover Hurstwood demonstrates the coldness of the capitalist system to the less fortunate. Once his bar goes out of business, Hurstwood joins the ranks of the unemployed. Desperate, he works as a scab during a trolley strike. Dreiser is sympathetic not only to the strikers but also to the strikebreakers and the police whose job it is to protect them. The policeman guarding the trolley offices is torn between his sympathy for the strikers and his duty. Even the scabs understand the strikers' plight, but they have no other options. Workers in Sister Carrie are tossed out because of illness and layoffs, and no job is safe. The capitalist marketplace pits the working classes against one another, making good on Gould's boast.

The apotheosis of the "muckraking" trend was The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair (1878–1968). Sinclair, on assignment from the socialist journal Appeal to Reason, spent seven weeks investigating the meatpacking plants of Chicago. The Jungle, the story of the immigrant Jurgis Rudkus's journey from the Old World to the Chicago stockyards, exposes the meat industry as corrupt and degrading. Sinclair details the hazardous working conditions that lead to injury and death, and the harsh treatment of the managers, who cast out old and injured workers, blacklist union members, and continually demand increased production.

What Sinclair's audience found most appalling, however, was not the conditions of the worker but the unsanitary treatment of the meat. Descriptions of spoiled meat being masked with chemicals and rats being turned into sausage elicited such an uproar that Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act within months of the book's publication. This response was somewhat disheartening to Sinclair, who saw the meat industry as emblematic of the abuses of capitalism and had hoped to convert his audience to socialism.

By the First World War many literary artists were firmly on the side of the worker against the "gods of labor." While their critiques of capitalism gained the public's attention, sympathy, and occasional indignation, the labor movement did not win the approval of the majority of Americans, nor did it enlist a majority of workers as members. The literature of labor did, however, force America to examine its values and the extent to which the nation was enabling opportunity for all.

See alsoAnarchism; Business and Industry Novels; City Dwellers; Haymarket Square; A Hazard of New Fortunes; The Jungle; McClure's Magazine; Muckrakers and Yellow Journalism; Poverty; Reform; Sister Carrie; Socialism; Utopias and Dystopias

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. 1888. Foreword by Erich Fromm. New York: Signet Classic, 1960.

"Carl Sandburg." In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 2nd ed., edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, pp. 268–270. New York: Norton, 1988.

Crane, Stephen. "In the Depths of a Coal Mine." 1894. In The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader, edited by Susan Harris Smith and Melanie Dawson, pp. 156–163. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.

Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. 1900. Afterword by Willard Thorp. New York: Signet Classic, 1980.

Hay, John. The Bread-Winners. 1883. Edited by Charles Vandersee. New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1973.

Howells, William Dean. A Hazard of New Fortunes. 1890. Afterword by Benjamin DeMott. New York: Meridian, 1994.

Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. 1890. Edited by David Leviatin. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1996.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. 1906. Afterword by Emory Elliot. New York: Signet Classic, 1990.

Tourgée, Albion. Murvale Eastman, Christian Socialist. New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1890.

Secondary Works

Babson, Steve. The Unfinished Struggle: Turning Points inAmerican Labor, 1877–Present. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

Dulles, Foster Rhea. Labor in America: A History. Northbrook, Ill.: AHM Publishing, 1960.

Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Le Blanc, Paul. A Short History of the U.S. Working Class:From Colonial Times to the Twenty-first Century. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1999.

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Andrew Rennick