The Cellar - Labor vs Everybody

Labor vs Robber Barons & Capitalists & Government

Politicians promise to “make America great again”, go back to “what we used to be”.
The people hearing that think of the 1950s, with opportunity, employment, and a growing middle class. When a partnership between, strong unions, strong Government, and strong Corporations, all with a national interest, in spite of an adversarial roll.
But in fact, those politicians want to go back to the post Civil War boom of capitalism.

Quote:

In the summer of l877, former president Ulysses Grant was vacationing in Europe when he heard alarming news from home. A railroad strike, the Great Uprising of l877, was sweeping across the country, from Pittsburgh to Chicago. Striking workers were burning and pillaging industrial property, and fighting pitched battles with federal troops sent to crush the strike by President Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes was acting at the insistence of some of America's leading capitalists, and Grant was puzzled by this.

During Reconstruction, Grant had been attacked by these same capitalists for using federal troops, under General Phil Sheridan, to protect black people in New Orleans against Klu Klux Klan-style violence. Now "the whole power of the government," Grant said, was being used "to suppress a strike on the slightest intimation that danger threatens." Grant wasn't the only one to note the irony.

"I wish Sheridan was at Pittsburgh," a neighbor declared to the son of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. "Indeed," Garrison shot back, "but remember how you denounced him at New Orleans." This little exchange showed how the country had changed. "The Negro issue," as one paper called it, was dead.

The Strike of l877 had pushed to the forefront the issue of "capital and labor." The strike was over in a few weeks, crushed by troops and canister shot. But it had awakened Americans to the fact that they were living in a new country where industry was the dominant force, industrialists the new American Medici, and continuing labor strife a certainty.

Following the strike, the Chicago department store magnate, Marshall Field, donated money to the city's police force to buy an arsenal that included four l2-pound Napoleon cannons. Chicago and other cities began constructing armories to house beefed up National Guard units, and General Sheridan, now stationed in the Chicago area, began issuing threats against labor agitators. "The better classes," he said, "are tired of the insane howlings of the lowest strata, and they mean to stop them."

This was indisputably a new America, and the revolution that was creating it, the Industrial Revolution, was for the next century and more the greatest agent of change in the history of humankind. The Civil War had spawned a new generation of capitalists: Andrew Carnegie in steel, John D. Rockefeller in oil, J. Pierpont Morgan in banking, and Philip Armour and Gustavus Swift in meatpacking. Working closely with inventors like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and George Westinghouse, they would radically transform this country and much of the world.

In these years, America came to be known to the world as a technological nation, a nation of builders and inventors: makers of roaring steel mills, long-reaching railroads, and wondrous suspension bridges. As the writer William Dean Howells declared: "It is in the things of iron and steel that the national genius most freely speaks." America's most characteristic and character-shaping achievement has been its talent for inventing and making things. And in no period was this more decisively in evidence than in the final three decades of the nineteenth century.

Does that give you goose bumps? Make you proud? Prompt you to chant USA!?
Yeah, me too. But do you want to live in that era? I don’t unless I’m a Medici.

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