in the annals of the era, the wave of May Day, 1886, eight-hour strikes stand out as worker initiatives not begun in response to employer wage cuts, though there is a caveat even to this exception: just as in the subsequent Lawrence Strike, many struck employers prompted walkouts by refusing worker demands to receive the same wage (previously figured on a ten-hour schedule) for the shortened workday.
In a boom-bust economy, conflicting imperatives, it seems, set employers and workers bitterly against each other. Employers, in particular, facing declining revenues and desperately clinging to property rights arguments (explored in Chapter 1) as well as their bottom lines, long appeared clueless in adopting any policy other than wage cuts, despite their disruptive social and political after-effects. 10 By the onset of the Great Depression, however, a new pattern seemed to emerge. Negative public reaction and labor upheavals as a result of wage-cutting—the old pattern we have observed from 1860 to 1912 (and which continued through the 1920/21 downturn)—appeared finally to take a behavioral toll on the nation’s business leaders. While hesitating to cut wages, beleaguered depression industries instead cut work hours, and then eliminated jobs altogether. 11
In more recent times, other options continue to prevail over the incendiary wage cuts of the Long Gilded Age. Perhaps it was not until conservative anger at public-sector workers (highlighted by the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981) that the catchphrase “fire their asses” caught up to real-world managerial practices. 12 In any case, selective layoffs and job cuts have regularly replaced the favored Gilded Age remedy to employer economic stress. If not exactly an “out of sight, out of mind” solution, reduction of the workforce tends to render the victims comparatively invisible, even as those spared a pink slip are effectively reminded to think again before upsetting corporate decorum. Even public-sector employers, faced with few options amid the recent Great Recession, have notably tried to avoid naked wage cuts in favor of “furloughs,” or mandatory days off.
Yet, knowing what “triggered’ Gilded Age unrest does little to explain how it developed or ended. For that, we must summon up some of the main characters. Given their power in the era, and the fact that in most labor-management conflicts they usually played with a winning hand, I want to look first, in each case, at labor’s opponents. Then I will circle back in selective reconsideration of the pro-labor forces of the day.
In the figures of Carnegie and Pullman, we have prime specimens of the class that has been popularly memorialized as either “Robber Barons” or “Captains of Industry,” but in either case as prototypes of American anti-unionism. Yet, they were also rather complex figures. In particular, as key contributors to the distinctiveness of the American industrial order, they seem sometimes to be grappling as much with the ghosts of British or European pasts as concrete American realities.
Carnegie, of course, was the protagonist of the Homestead Strike of 1892, a fateful standoff between one of the biggest corporations and the most powerful union of the Gilded Age. When the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW) together with an aroused local citizenry proved unable to withstand a combination of lockout, importation of Pinkertons to protect strikebreakers, and ultimate application of state militia, unionism took a toll beyond the immediate casualties of nine dead and eleven wounded. In the steel industry, declining wages and yellow-dog contracts requiring a binding non-union pledge subsequently became the norm. Overvaluing its remaining resources, the Amalgamated made a final, fateful decision to confront the newly formed U.S. Steel monolith in 1901, a decision ending in crushing defeat. 13 Once the last steel lodge in the country dissolved in 1903, Big Steel inoculated itself from trade unionism for the next thirty-four years. 14
Moreover, despite Carnegie’s calculated self-removal to his Scottish castle and delegation of authority to his business lieutenant Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead events, a clear chain of authority set the fateful events in motion. Like the Boston Associates who a half century before had created the spindle city of Lowell out of Merrimack River farmland, Carnegie had within a decade turned a village of a few hundred residents into an industrial center of 8,000 people mainly occupied making steel plate (much of it for the U.S. navy) with the nation’s largest rolling mill. It was Carnegie who first negotiated a “sliding scale” (geared to the market price of a key component in the manufacturing process) with the Amalgamated in 1889, then, deciding to go entirely non-union, provoked a strike by stockpiling plates, fencing in the plant, insisting on a reduction in tonnage rates, contracting with the Pinkertons to recruit a substitute labor force, then calling for military intervention and ultimately encouraging the most draconian legal penalties against the strikers. 15 Indeed, John McLuckie, the twice-elected burgess (mayor) of Homestead, fled the state rather than face charges of murder, conspiracy, and treason for opposing the Pinkertons; a once-proud skilled worker, his pro-union stand cost him his job, his home, and his marriage. 16 There is thus ample evidence to finger Carnegie as the “intellectual” author of the Homestead tragedy, while leaving Frick—who would survive an assassination attempt by anarchist Alexander Berkman at the end of the strike—to serve as the fall guy.
Yet, we are also left to reconcile Carnegie’s onerous role as industrial autocrat with his philanthropical acts both before and after the strike. Of course, his philanthropy, as perhaps most famously associated with his endowment of public libraries, could be chalked up to liberal guilt or worse. From the beginning there is a touch of defensiveness in “The Gospel of Wealth” (Carnegie’s famous 1889 essay). “While the law [of competition] may be hard for the individual,” Carnegie insisted, “it is best for the race.” Yet, he allowed that the concentration of wealth in a few hands (like his own) would likely be accepted in a free society only so long as the rich treat it as a “sacred trust.” 17 In addition, gift-giving could prove quite strategic: Carnegie himself was finalizing plans for the Carnegie Library of Homestead—arriving in town with “a Pullman-car-full of guests”—just two months before he locked out his employees. The Homestead historian thus does not have to reach far to contextualize such acts within the framework of behavioral “social deception” as explained by anthropologist Marcel Mauss, that “the transaction itself is based on obligation and economic self-interest” in furtherance of social hierarchy. 18
Still, there were aspects of the man that seem to point to less predictable behavioral patterns. Outwardly confident and even boisterously sure of himself, Carnegie likely could not easily dissociate the grievances of Homestead workers from his own past as the son of a failed Scottish handloom weaver and grandson of a proud Chartist activist in the working-class movement for radical democratic reform that swept British industrial districts for a decade after 1838. Escape from the class system is thus a central theme behind the soaring rhetoric of his Triumphant Democracy (1886). Notably, it is not entrepreneurship, technology, or even hard work which, for Carnegie, account for the American Republic’s triumphal “rush” past the “old nations of the world [that] creep on at a snail’s pace.” Rather, with universal suffrage and free public education, “the people are not emasculated by being made to feel that their own country decrees their inferiority, and holds them unworthy of privileges accorded to others.” Freed from a “social system which ranks them beneath an arrogant class of drones,” Carnegie anticipates Israel Zangwell’s melting-pot, where “children of Russian and German serfs, of Irish evicted tenants, Scottish crofters, and other victims of feudal tyranny are transmuted into republican Americans.” 19 Carnegie’s career was self-consciously steeped in the ideals of both social and political independence. It is thus no accident that when, at eighteen, having just graduated from four years of service as a telegraph messenger to become private secretary to Pennsylvania Railroad owner Tom Scott, Carnegie would look around at his adopted country and exclaim (in correspondence to a British uncle), “We have the Charter.” 20
Even as a profit-seeking American industrialist, therefore, Carnegie was in some significant respects still tethered to the democratic concerns of the British liberal tradition. Regularly spending half of each year in the UK (historian A. S. Eisenstadt labels him the
