CHAPTER  III

THE WORKINGMAN OF THE ERA

   Much could be written about the workingman of the period of 1860 to 1900.  This chapter, however, will be restricted to a brief discussion of labor’s relationship with the captains of industry and labor’s attitude toward religion.

   Following the Civil War entrepreneurs came to view labor as a commodity.  Capital’s impersonal viewpoint toward labor put workers at odds with their employers.  As a result, labor revolted.
   The gulf that separated the workingman and the employer, either individual or corporate was caused by vast economic changes.  Before the Civil War industry was smaller in scope, less of it was corporately organized.  The independent artisan was still an important industrial factor, and escape from the ranks of labor was less difficult.  The relationship of employer and employee of that previous period had almost disappeared by the eighties.  A brass-worker, discussing this change before a Senate Committee in 1883, remarked:
“Well, I remember that fourteen years ago the workman and foremen and the boss were all as one happy family; it was just as easy and as free to speak to the boss as anyone else, but now the boss is superior, and the men all go to the foremen; but we would not think of looking the foreman in the face now any more than we would the boss. . . .  The Average hand growing up in the shop now would not think of speaking to the boss, would not presume to recognize him, nor the boss would not recognize him either.”1  Employers “adopt a superior standpoint,” complained another testifying employee.  “The employer has much the same feeling towards the men that he had toward his machinery.  He wants to get as much as he can out of his men at the cheapest rate. . . .  That is all he cares for the man generally.”2  One industrialist bluntly stated, according to Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, “I regard my employees as I do a machine, to be used to my advantage, and when they are old and of no further use I cast them in the street.”3

The Relationship of the Captains of Industry and Labor

   The indifference to human worth here demonstrated was neither an invention of Gompers nor wholly exceptional.  A wool-manufacturer in New England complacently observed that when workers “get starved down to it, then they will go to work at just what you can afford to pay.”4   Such views accompanied the conviction that it is, as Jay Gould put it, an “axiom . . . that labor is a commodity that will in the long run be governed absolutely by the law of supply and demand.”5   This argument justified adequately the manner in which workers were commonly treated.  Labor was a commodity, and there was no reason why it should be dealt with differently from other commodities.

The Change in Labor Relations

   As it became increasingly conscious of its condition, labor boldly voiced its complaints and demands and resorted more widely to industrial action to gain its objectives.  In twenty-five years, 1881-1905, there occurred in the United States 38,303 strikes and lockouts which involved 7,444,270 workers in 199,954 plants.6 Four of these strikes were particularly explosive and rocked the social structure of the nation to its foundations. 

The Revolt of Labor

   The first were the railroad strikes in 1877 that spread out over the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore, and Ohio, and the New York Central railroads.  Historian Henry F. May called them “the most destructive labor battle in American history,” since these strikes involved workers, police, militia, and federal troops fighting pitched battles in many cities.7 Property damage was immense, and sober men envisioned mobocracy and revolution.  The year 1877 became a symbol of shock, of the possible crumbling of society.8  
  The second was the disastrous Haymarket affair in Chicago.  In a clash between pickets and police at the McCormick Harvester Plant on May 3, 1886, six of the picketers were killed and several wounded.  At a protest meeting held the next day in Haymarket Square a bomb was thrown which killed eight policemen and injured twenty-seven persons.  The trial, which resulted in seven “anarchists” being sentenced to death (four were hanged, one committed suicide, and two were given life-imprisonment), revealed a widespread mood of hysteria.9  
   The third was the great strike of the Carnegie Steel Plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892.  On July 5 two boatloads of armed Pinkerton detectives, sent by General Manager Henry Clay Frick to guard the mills after he had shut them down, were driven off in a pitched battle with strikers and twenty invaders were wounded.  Eventually eight thousand state militia reasserted control for the company, and the mill was reopened with nonunion labor.10
   The fourth was the great strike at the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1894, when President Grover Cleveland–over the protests of Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois–sent two thousand federal troops to Chicago to “guard the mails.”  The injunction was effectively used against the unions.  The propriety and necessity of dispatching federal troops to the area have been keenly debated ever since.11

The Relationship of the Church to Labor

   Because of the church’s lack of sympathy for the workingman’s plight and revolt, labor developed a hostile stance toward institutional Protestantism.  The Catholics were able to remain in positive relationship with labor because many immigrant workers were Roman Catholics.  Although they rejected “churchianity,” which they held to be another word for pious fraud and pretense, most workers professed belief in Christianity.12

Labor’s Relationship to Protestantism

   Until there is further research into the religious habits of nineteenth-century workers to prove otherwise, present historical research demonstrates widespread defection of workingmen from the ranks of Protestantism.  In the desperate struggle which was taking place over the distribution of this world’s goods, workingmen beheld the clergy as accepting the economic principles of their wealthy parishioners.  Workers were not church-goers because clergymen did not understand the life of a worker and too often apologized for the wrongful actions of employers, according to Samuel Rompers.13 “There was a time,” he wrote in 1919, “when the ministry belonged to the host that prayer for us one minute on Sunday and preyed on all the rest of the week.”14  Workers found themselves, moreover strangers to the elegant trappings provided in houses of worship by the wealthy.  High pew rents isolated them from those who could afford desirable locations.  “Have the working classes fallen away from the churches or have the churches fallen away from the working class?” inquired the Reverend Charles F. Goss of the Chicago Avenue Church (later named the Moody Memorial Church), as he thought about the workers’ indifference and hostility toward religious institutions.  He said, “There is no place in the average Chicago church for the poor man . . . surrounded by individuals who not only regard poverty as a disgrace, but by their vulgar display endeavor to perpetually remind the poor man of his poverty.”15  

   Hostility toward Institutional Protestantism

   Whenever workers engaged in a strike to gain what they believed theirs, they heard the clergy voice from the pulpit opinions similar to those held by their employers.  As strikes spawned violence and workingmen united, the clergy attacked them in general as socialists and communists who should be hunted down like “mad dogs.”  In order to quell radicalism ministers approved of a strong militia, prompt suppression of independent drill clubs, absolute prohibition of free assembly where inflammatory speeches might be made, a rigid censorship of the press and of all printed material, and the denial of the vote to communists.  On the Sunday following the Haymarket affair, pulpits rang with denunciations of workers.  Little, if any, distinction was drawn between those workers who participated in violence and those who had not.16
   Because of the church’s posture of active or passive alliance with labor’s oppressors, workers lost confidence in institutional Protestantism.  Washington Gladden cited the instance of a “tired-looking shop girl” in Boston who, in response to a query by a reporter as to the reason for her failing to attend church services, replied, “My employer goes.  He is one of the pillars of the Church.  That’s reason enough why I shouldn’t go.  I know how he treats his help.”17 During the eighties several ministers investigated the religious habits of the various occupational groups, invariably discovering the wage-earners attended Protestant services in much smaller proportions than other classes.18
      Even Protestant churches that had adopted a progressive social stance failed to reach and to attract the support of labor.  Henry F. May suggests three main reasons for this failure.  First, there had developed an emotional wall of hostility between churchmen and labor.  The wall was old and strong.  Labor leaders did not recognize nor could they believe that they had new friends among the ministers of the progressive social movement.
   Second, the ministers who did attempt to tear down the wall of hostility and profess friendship for organized labor often displayed an extreme lack of understanding of labor’s problems.  Many of the aims which the American labor movement stressed grew from the aims which the American labor movement stressed grew from immediate and often desperate needs.  The clerical progressives often misunderstood the immediacy of the situation.  They urged labor to be patient in their demands.  As a result, labor leaders had little confidence in the hope of religious progressives that industrial conflicts could be solved by appealing to the better natures of capital rather than through strikes.
   The third reason for failure was the unfortunate manner in which the progressive clerics approached union men urging them to abandon their vices.  Condescendingly these clergymen attempted to explain to the workingmen problems with which the latter had lived far too long.19 Because of a tradition of clerical hostility, a misunderstanding of labor’s problems, and the manner of its approach, even progressively social Protestantism was unable to attract the workingman to any great degree.

   Labor’s Relationship to Roman Catholicism

   Within the fold of Roman Catholicism, workers often of foreign birth or of alien parentage, felt the warmth of understanding and tolerance.  In Catholic parishes the workingmen predominated in the number of communicants, and there they met fellow worshipers on a plane of equality.  With the priest looking upon his parish as primarily service among the poor, and with the Church’s leadership recognizing that the increasingly powerful business corporations were not controlled by Catholics, workers by and large found a religious haven in the Catholic faith.  Even the Church’s hostility toward the secrecy of the Knights of Labor diminished under the influence of Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, and his insistence upon a sympathetic approach to the problems of labor preserved for the Church the loyalty of this part of the American population.  In 1891 Pope Leo XIII issued his important social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which placed the Church in the vanguard of humanitarians.20
   Although workers had rejected institutional Protestantism, many of them had not rejected the Christian faith.  To the charge that workingmen were atheists, John Willett, a Michigan trade-unionist, quickly retorted, “We believe much in Jesus and his teachings, but not much in the teachings of his pretended followers.”21 Though highly critical of the churches, the workers’ desired aim was not to destroy but to socialize Protestant Christianity.

   Labor's Use of Protestant Faith  

   The workers took Protestant traditions and used them to justify labor organization and agitation, to encourage workers to challenge industrial power, and to compel criticism of “natural” economic laws, the crude optimism of social Darwinism, and even the conformist Christianity of most respectable clergymen.  The workers drew from premillennial and postmillennial understandings of the Protestant faith.  The premillennial theme was subordinate to the postmillennial.  However, this pessimistic, apocalyptic tradition appealed to those who experienced psychological strain because of the social and economic changes wrought by the industrializing process.22 To these workers change itself meant decay and destruction.  Thus prophesies of doom and imminent catastrophe before “redemption” were meaningful.23  
   The Christian perfectionism and postmillenialism, identified with Charles G. Finney and other pre-Civil War and pre-industrial evangelical revivalists, were predominant in the thinking of labor leaders in the Gilded Age.24 Prominent Gilded Age trade-unionists, labor reformers, and even radicals–with the notable exception of Samuel Gompers and Daniel De Leon–shared a common faith in a just God, effused perfectionist doctrine and warned of divine retribution against continuing injustice.  This form of Protestantism offered labor leaders and their followers a transhistoric framework to challenge the new industrialism and a common set of moral imperatives to measure their rage against and to order their dissatisfaction.25
   The social Christianity espoused by workingmen was different from the more widely known and well-studied social gospel put forth by middle- and upper-class religious critics of industrial society.  As Herbert G. Gutman has pointed out, “Both groups reacted against the early disintegrating consequences of rapid industrialization and drew from the same broad religion tradition.”26 However, available evidence demonstrates few formal connections between the two movements.27