America Aflame (82 page)

Management would argue that capital costs, especially in new industries that required expensive technology, demanded a cheap labor force to maintain profit margins. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company was among the best employers in the 1870s, providing reading rooms and recreational facilities for its workers and, extremely rare for the time period, industrial accident insurance policies for each worker. Yet when barrelmakers in his employ struck in 1877 in response to a wage cut, Rockefeller was collecting dividends at a rate of $720 an hour, more than most of his workers earned in a year. During the first half of 1877, Standard Oil paid out eighty dollars in dividends on each hundred-dollar share of its stock.
11

Workers found themselves estranged not only from management but also from the middle class. America may have yet been a nation of shopkeepers and farmers, but that was changing. Postwar society provided great opportunities for the urban middle class, and its members opposed any group or idea that threatened their advance. “The great ‘middle-class,'” the
New York Times
observed, “which now governs the world, will everywhere be terrified at these terrible outburst[s] and absurd[ities], they will hold a strong rein on the lower classes.”
12

Walt Whitman, the poet of the middle class, was singing again, a sure sign that things were getting better. He saw through the joblessness, the hunger, and the violence to a brighter future. Whitman believed science would right the wrongs of labor unrest, of corruption and compromised electorates, and set America back on its course to greatness. Manifest destiny had become a theorem, not a theology. He wrote in “Song of the Universal” (1874):

Lo! keen-eyed, towering Science!

As from tall peaks the Modern overlooking,

Successive, absolute fiats issuing.…

For it, the mystic evolution;

Not the right only justified—what we call evil also justified.…

Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow

Out of the bad majority—the varied, countless frauds of men and States,

Electric, antiseptic yet—cleaving, suffusing all,

Only the good is universal.
13

Whitman's salute to science reflected the transformation of American thinking on labor. Perhaps workers were no longer proto-capitalists after all. In “A Song for Occupations,” composed in 1855, Whitman described an array of workers and jobs, concluding with an affirmation of the individual worker as an exalted figure: “You workwomen and workmen of these States having your own divine and strong life, / And all else giving place to men and women like you.” By the 1870s, his perspective on “workwomen” and “workmen” had changed. In “Song of the Exposition” (1871), Whitman wrote of “sacred industry.” The individual worker had blended into industrial “armies,” fuel to feed American enterprise.
14

Scientists urged lawmakers not to interfere with natural law to aid laborers. Simon Newcomb, a pioneer in the application of mathematical models to economics, warned that if the government intervened in “the peculiar and limited field of political economy, nothing but harm will result.” Sociologist William Graham Sumner told his students at Yale that adhering to natural law comported with God's will, or at least the will of God the Scientist. “You need not think it necessary to have Washington exercise a political providence over the country,” he lectured. “God has done that a great deal better by the laws of political economy.” America, the nation of laws, had just accrued a large number of new statutes.
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Sumner was quick to add that it was appropriate for the government to enhance the ability of the worker to accumulate capital. The state could do this by offering the laborer “the greatest possible measure of liberty in the directing of his own energies for his own development,” and, second, “giv[ing] him the greatest possible security in the possession and use of the products of his own industry.” The state, however, should not become the employer of last resort. “The moment that government provided work for one,” Sumner warned, “it would have to provide work for all, and there would be no end whatever possible. Society does not owe any man a living.” Sumner's advice to the worker: “He has got to fight the battle with nature as every other man has.”
16

The entrepreneurs were not particularly Darwinian with respect to their own enterprises. They had no intention of sending their companies into “the battle of nature.” Competition, they felt, was wasteful; it encouraged inefficiency, unethical behavior, and instability. Consolidation quieted volatile markets and enabled companies to take advantage of economies of scale that benefited shareholders and consumers alike. Samuel Dodd, the chief counsel for Rockefeller's Standard Oil empire, remarked that competition “carried to the furthest extreme without cooperation or compromise … would be a fit mode for savages, not for civilized men.” Yet when it came to workers or blacks, the competitive, not the cooperationist, model prevailed. The scientific conclusion should have been that social ethics and policy do not derive from the laws of nature. Darwin intended no such analogy. Yet the application of Darwin to society went forward.
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Workers, apparently following Sumner's advice to “fight the battle with nature,” organized into labor unions at a record pace during the 1870s. The largest, the Knights of Labor, embraced a variety of occupations and skills. Other unions divided along craft lines, such as miners and carpenters. There were also unions based on ethnic background. From 1870 onward, roughly one third of factory workers were foreign-born. The various and often competing labor communities inhibited the formation of a major proletarian political movement as in Europe. The presence of immigrants in the workplace, for example, created tensions that common grievances rarely transcended. California laborers led the fight for legislation barring Chinese workers from the United States. The campaign resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law to close the United States to all citizens from a foreign country. Said one native-born ironworker: “Immigrants work for almost nothing and seem to be able to live on wind—something which I can not do.”
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Workers should not have been so anxious. Science, as Whitman sang, would cure the world's problems. Edward Livingston Youmans, a social scientist from New York, wrote to Spencer at the height of the corruption scandals in the early 1870s, “There is no salvation for this continent except in the acquirement of some proximately scientific conception of the nature of governments.” Youmans and other intellectuals believed that only a thorough application of science would generate the stability necessary for national progress. Policies based on laws derived from scientific research into government and society would eliminate corruption, solve conflicts between capital and labor, and restore harmony to the democratic process.
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The consensus against government intervention not grounded in the scientific method called into question even private ameliorations. Charities came under increasing scrutiny. Many faltered under the great burdens of the depression. Charities were likely to be underfunded in the best of times, with varying criteria for aid. They were generally aware of demographic, geographic, and ethnic changes in their cities, though they rarely studied the nature and extent of their clientele. This ad hoc approach to charity began to change in the 1870s with the arrival of English clergyman Samuel Humphreys Gurteen. In 1877, Gurteen founded the Charity Organization Society in Buffalo, New York. The idea was to establish a “scientific philanthropy.” Within five years, the COS spread to twenty-five cities. COS organizers contended that poverty resulted from individual moral defects. Charity, traditionally dispensed, worsened the problem by indulging the poor. The COS proposed to change the culture by organizing all local charities under one roof, a Union Station of giving. The new organization proposed thorough investigations of applicants to determine their worthiness for relief and advocated tying charity to work. The COS depended on an army of middle-class women who volunteered as “friendly visitors” to mentor the poor out of poverty and wean them off assistance. The orderly transformation of charity did not end poverty or even make a serious impact. The COS did, however, provide a scientific basis for later reforms such as the settlement house movement and public welfare departments.
20

The debate over intervention in the economy and in the South infiltrated the off-year elections in 1874. The economy had not recovered by then, and unrest in the South persisted. In one of the greatest swings in American history, the Democrats turned a 110-seat Republican majority in the House into a 60-vote advantage for their party. Federal Reconstruction was already moribund by late 1874, but the Democratic resurgence sounded the death knell for the remaining southern Republican governments. Northern Republicans retreated as quickly as they could from their party's remaining regimes in the South. The Republican press, once the staunchest defender of black suffrage, turned against the involvement of freedmen in southern governments. E. L. Godkin, editor of the
Nation
, who suddenly fancied himself an expert on evolution, informed his readers that the “blackest” legislators were always the worst, especially in South Carolina, where the black population possessed an overall “average of intelligence but slightly above the level of animals.”
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The Republicans' infighting also reflected their concern that instability in the South inhibited economic recovery. Republicans urged Grant to allow nature to run its course in the South. Hard on the heels of James Pike's report serialized in the
Tribune
came the articles of Charles Nordhoff for the rival
New York Herald
. Nordhoff collected his essays in a book,
The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1875
(1876), concluding that a return to power of responsible whites would guarantee blacks' rights and restore law and order to the South.
22

The economy and the intellectual consensus against government intervention shredded what remained of federal Reconstruction policy. The recession hit the South hard. Many of the railroads forced into receivership were located there. Northern roads purchased the companies at bargain prices and would set freight rates that placed southern shippers at a competitive disadvantage for the next century. Republican governments in the South had invested heavily in the railroads, leaving thin treasuries in the wake of the Panic. This forced tax increases that broadened discontent. To compound matters, the price of cotton, the South's major money crop, dropped 50 percent during the depression, barely covering the costs of production. Part of the problem was a serious oversupply. Cotton growing even penetrated the southern upcountry, a stranger to cultivation before the war. Cleveland County, North Carolina, grew only 520 bales of cotton in 1870 and more than ten times that amount a decade later. In a cash-poor region, cotton was readily convertible into money, so everyone grew it. By 1880, southern per capita income had fallen to one third that of the North. None of this boded well for the remaining Republican regimes in the South.
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Northerners had hoped to remake the South into the North's own image—a region of productive and efficient family farms following the tenets of scientific agriculture and mechanized cultivation and harvesting. White southerners were uninterested in northern visions. Their focus was always on controlling the freedmen, especially their labor. The former slave was not helpless in negotiating work contracts, though the power in the relationship rested with the landowner. Blacks' refusal to work in teams ended the gang labor system. After experimentation with various land tenure and employment arrangements, sharecropping emerged as the prevailing agricultural labor system in the South in the 1870s. It suited the cash-poor region, and it enabled black sharecroppers to cultivate in families, make decisions about their crop, and gain some autonomy. Promising from one quarter to one half of the crop's proceeds to the landowner, sharecropping allowed the black farmer to generate an income and savings. Some croppers graduated to tenancy, which allowed more autonomy and the prospects of higher profits. A few sharecroppers eventually became landowners.

The system often broke down, however, as a result of the declining price of cotton, swindling by landlords, and inflated prices at the company store. Some croppers never escaped debt, and debt peonage appeared in the South by the mid-1870s. It resembled slavery, except the landowner was under no compulsion to provide food and medical care for his croppers. The system created a permanent and marginally literate black underclass and blocked land improvements, maintenance, and mechanization that reinforced the South's colonial economic status through the first half of the twentieth century. The major difference between labor in the North and the South was the greater degree of control exercised by southern employers. Strikes and demonstrations in the cotton fields were few.
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The white South used the cover of the 1873 depression and the attendant problems of labor unrest and corruption to speed the redemption process. The popularity of Darwin and the smoldering example of the Paris Commune also worked in favor of the Redeemers. After the 1874 elections, three states in the Lower South remained under Republican control: Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, all with large black electorates that maintained the party in power. White leaders in the three unredeemed states embarked on campaigns of publicity and violence to overthrow the alien regimes. They could count on the absence of a coherent response from Washington and a growing consensus among northerners that the experiment with black suffrage was a failure. It was best to allow natural laws to take their course. If white southerners helped nature along, so much the better.