January 31: Remembering Class Conflict and Challenges to the System

Read before class:

  • Give Me Liberty 614-647

·         My outline on corporations and the law (I will go over this in class, but review before, and you might wish to bring this outline to class)  overhead form

Workers, Indians, Immigrants as the menace to national order photo that corresponds to lecture, but no need to print it out

  • Voices of Freedom 32-50

 

Questions: Please, think about these questions before you come to class!!

1)How do capitalism’s critics in the documents you read above contest the ideas espoused by social Darwinism and the idea of liberty as defined by capitalism’s advocates like Carnegie? What ideas did they advocate?

2)What do you think of these ideas?

3) How is the labor movement and populist movement’s vision of progress different from Carnegie’s/social Darwinism?

4) Do you find the issues they raised relevant to the present?

 

Recommended Websites: 

 

Conditions, Pay, etc:

·         Workers, Indians, Immigrants as the menace to national order

·         Late Nineteenth-Century Rail Worker Describes Management’s Tyranny

  • Listen to a folk song that comes from the long depression of 1873-1877

http://members.nbci.com/elstongunn/beggar.html

·           “Store Pay Is Our Ruin”: The Tyranny of the Company Store 1878, Ohio

·         “Caught in the Shafting.” Dangers of industrial work

·            Six Families Budget Their Money, Illinois, 1884

·            Massachusett’s workers expenditures, 1885

·            An Old New York Cabinet Maker: Experiences of Ernest Hagen –handcraft work and resisting mechanization

·            Late Nineteenth-Century Rail Worker Describes Management’s Tyranny

·            The Working Girls of Boston, 1884

·            A German Radical Emigrates to America in 1885

·            Elfido López Recalls Rural Mexican-American Life in the Late 19th century –transformation of the countryside

·            A cowboy remembers work as a wage laborer in the late 19th century

·           A Cowboy’s Work is Never Done: George Martin

·           African-American Cowboy Will Crittendon

·           Shying Away: Samuel Gompers on  Steering Clear of the Farmers’ Alliance

·            Slumming Among the Unemployed: William Wycoff Studies Joblessness in the 1890s

·          A Year’s Wage for Three Peaches: A Black Man Tells of Exploitation in the Late 19th century South –fear of the chain gang

·         Forced Labor in the “New South”, 1904 

·         White Women Protest the Hiring of Black “Wage-Slaves”

·         Pilgrims' Progress: A Seventeenth-Century Solution to the Nineteenth-Century Conflict between Labor and Capital

·         Law and Order: William Law and the Power of Organization

·         Chicago Stockyards, with links to bibliography of sources

·         The Pullman Era with links to bibliography of sources

·          Polish Immigrants Letters Back Home in early 20th century

·          “We Ran Silent Movies For Years”: An Italian Immigrant Goes Into Show Business in the Early Twentieth Century

·          Italian Workers Across the World

·         Inside the Westinghouse factory, 1904

·          On the Lower East Side: Observations of Life in Lower Manhattan at the Turn of the Century   This collection of articles, documentary sources, and study guides was compiled to accompany the course, An Urban Experience: New York City's Lower East Side, 1880-1920

·         “We Chinese Are Viewed Like Thieves and Enemies”: Pun Chi Appeals to Congress to Protect the Rights of Chinese, ca. 1860

·         Who Built the Railroad?
A famous photograph taken on May 10, 1869, commemorated the meeting of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads at Promontory Point, Utah, which marked the completion of the transcontinental railroad. This image was widely circulated yet is not an accurate representation of the event. This puzzle asks “What’s wrong with this photograph?”

·          Chinese laborers exclusion act

·         “Our Misery and Despair”: Kearney Blasts Chinese Immigration (1878)

·         The Fight Begins at Home: Jewett Defends Asian Immigrants (1878)

·          Fair’s Fair: McDonnell Argues for Acceptance of Aliens (1878)

·          Eye on the East: Labor Calls for Ban on Chinese Immigration (1901)

 

·          “The Poisonous Occupations in Illinois”-- “Dangerous Trades” at the Turn of the Century

·          Mother Jones, “Civilization in Southern Mills” (1901)

 

·         Coal Mining in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era - Pictures and Texts-this web site gives a wonderful overview of coal mining and its dangers. Material on Mollie Maguires, child labor in the mines, and the 1902 anthracite strike

·          African American Miners in the United Mine Workers of America

·          The Life and Work of Coal Miners 1860s-early 20th century, links to literary and first-hand accounts, including child labor in the mines

·          Early Days of Coal Mining in Illinois

·          Pinkertons in the Couer d’Alene Uprising of 1892 (primary document)

·         “In the Sight of God”: Woes of a Miner’s Wife, 1900 (document)

·         The Molly Maguires.  Allan Pinkerton’s depiction

 

1877 Upheaval:

·         Exhibit from the Chicago Historical Society—Prologue of Haymarket·         Secondary and Primary Documents listing from Maryland State Archives

·         The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx

·            A Labor Newspaper Derides the Myth of the Self-Made  Man, 1877

·           Fears of the “Tramp Menace” –ad for Gun

·          Workers, Indians, Immigrants as the menace to national order

·         Re-Assessing Tom Scott, the 'Railroad Prince'

·         Jesse James, the railroad robber as folk hero (song)     Woody Guthrie Version

·         Excerpt from Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives by Alan Pinkerton- (document)

·         Materials on 1877 from Maryland State Archives, with links to primary documents (newspaper, government, photos) and suggested reading materials and lesson plans

·         Chicago during the 1877 strike – From Chicago Historical Society Haymarket website

·         General Strikes Across the Globe 

·         ·         From Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America  (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp.12-22.

·         History of General strikes around the world, including U.S.

·          Spies for Hire: Ads for the Pinkerton Detective Agency (primary document)

·         Telling Secrets Out of School: Siringo on the Pinkertons
With 2,000 active agents and 30,000 reserves, the forces of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency were larger than the nation’s standing army in the late-19th century.. Here is a description of how one operative infiltrated and undermined miners' unions in northern Idaho during the 1892 Coeur d’Alene strike.

Haymarket

Labor Day/May Day/shorter hours                                 

·         The origins and traditions of May Day

·         8 hour day poem.htm

·         May Day and Labor Day by David Montgomery

·         First Labor Day Parade by Ted Watts

·         The origins of Labor Day

·         Printer Albert R. Parsons Testifies before Congress about the Eight Hour Day—1878--labor argues against legal notions of “freedom of contract”

·       Holt Labor Library feature on May Day  Bibliography, websites links, archives links

·       The Red and Green of May Day

·       References for shorters hours and American Labor history

·        32 hours—action for full employment Canadian site, with numerous links to European and Canadian websites associated with quest for shorter hours

·       The Labor Project for Working Families - advocacy and policy organization providing technical assistance, resources, and education to unions and union members on family issues in the workplace including: Childcare, Elder care, Family leave, Work hours, Quality of life.

·       Shorter Work Time Group U.S. based group

                                                                                                                                                                                   

 

Knights of Labor

·         “The Baby Was Made ’Delegate No. 800’”: Frances Willard Meets Elizabeth Rodgers in the 1880s Knights of Labor and women

·         Altared States: Marriage Ends an Organizer’s Career Knights of Labor and women

·         Racial Controversy at the Richmond 1886 Convention

·         Drawing the Line on Black-White Equality –1886 convention

·         “Making Common Cause”: The Knights’ Assembly Hall diverse social, political, and intellectual functions that the meeting hall played for its members

·         “In the Beginning . . .”: A Knight’s Sacred Oath

·         Divided We Conquer: A White Plantation Owner Undermines the Knights of Labor

·         Making Common Cause”: The Knights’ Assembly Hall diverse social, political, and intellectual functions that themeeting hall played for its member

 

·         Boycott Fever

·         Great Burlington Strike of 1888

·         Farmer-Labor Movement across the world

 

AFL/Samuel Gompers

·         Biographical sketch of Samuel Gompers  Quotations from Samuel Gompers on Immigration, Socialism, Child Labor,  and many other subjects

·         Making the Case for Socialism in the AFLJ. Mahlon Barnes of the Cigarmakers’ International Union and member of the Socialist Labor Party, helped defeat AFL leader Samuel Gompers for the Presidency of the AFL in 1894. Here he criticizes Gompers style of unionism

·         The AFL Protests Unemployment, 1893

·         Samuel Gompers Papers - biography, photos, documents

 

Labor and Religion in 19th century

·       Was Christ a Union Man? (document)

·       The Workingman’s Ten Commandments, 1878

·       Labor’s “Catechism”, 1887 (document)

·       “The Brotherhood of Man”-a unionist and the bible 1899 (document)

·         Cain and Abel Revisited: A Case for Keeping thy Brother –religious arguments for solidarity over individualism

            

 

Homestead

·         The Strike At Homestead –Ohio State University, links to a number of documents and photos

·   After the Battle of Homestead: Counting the Dead and Criminalizing the Strikers  links to documents

·   Andrew Carnegie’s Ode to Steelmaking

·    A Workingman’s Prayer for the Masses – satire on Andrew Carnegie’s “On Wealth”

·    Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Workers Protest Carnegie Library

·   Musical Saga of Homestead

·           Henry Frick on the necessity of battle with the strikers

·  “An Awful Battle at Homestead, Pa.”  

·   “I Will Kill Frick”: Emma Goldman on why anarchist Berkman decided to kill Frick

·    A Show of Support: Farmers Feed Homestead Strikers (1892)

·    Swinton’s Silver Lining: Taking Comfort in the 1892 Strikes

·   Telling Tales: Byington’s Study of Homestead  -- how life was shaped by the union defeat by 1907

·   Outside Looking In: Byington on Homestead’s Women (1907)

                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Pullman

Pullman Worker Denounces “Father” Pullman, 1895

Broken Spirits: Letters on the Pullman Strike

“Chicago Under the Mob”: Pullman strike illustration

Are Sleepers Protected by the Constitution?: Mr. Dooley on the Pullman Strike

 George Pullman answers the strikers

 Pullman Illinois Workers Tour

 Historic Pullman  Guided walking tour

 

 

Labor, Capital and the growing inequality of wealth in recent decades

                                                                                                                 

                                                                

·          Barbara Ehrenreich, Your Urine Please  -workers rights analyzed by their right to pee

·         UNFAIR ADVANTAGE  Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards by Human Rights Watch, 2000