chapter 6
“Gilded Age”
“Get rich; dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must,” the great novelist and humorist Mark Twain mockingly wrote of the spirit that triumphed throughout the country, a spirit of “money-fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions, and the sleep that does not refresh.” Twain called the post–Civil War period the “Gilded Age” because the glitter of the era covered over widespread corruption. In fact, some historians refer to government generosity to corporations as the period of the “great barbecue,” after the nineteenth-century tradition whereby politicians bribed ordinary voters with a big dinner just before election day. For instance, railroads stretching westward were granted miles of land on either side of new lines. Railroads then sold the land to settlers, and charged them ruinous rates to ship or receive goods. The U.S. government sent troops into the West to clear away the native American peoples (the various Indian tribes) who were obstacles to the economic “progress” represented by the expanding corporate-capitalist economy. Back East, however, it turned its eyes as great fortunes were made selling “watered” stock or manipulating the stock market. In 1873, a severe national depression was triggered when financier Jay Cooke went bankrupt due to overextended railroad investments (although in later years he rebuilt his fortune by shifting from banking to mining). The economic liberty of a few was allowed to create misery for millions. The U.S. Constitution defended citizens’ rights only against governmental abuse, and not against abuse by corporations. In fact, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ostensibly written to protect citizenship rights of ex-slaves, was also purposely worded to expand the rights of corporations! Securing democratic control over the industrial economy would not be an easy task.
National Labor Union
While corporations had a national form, trade-union organizations developed much more slowly. In 1866, workers formed the National Labor Union which focused much of its energies on limiting the work day to eight hours. Boston mechanic Ira Steward played a special role in agitating and educating for reduction of the workday in subsequent years, organizing and winning adherents to the Eight Hour Leagues. Instead of twelve to fourteen hours a day of work, there would be “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will.” It was iron molder William Sylvis, however, who was the moving force behind the NLU.
“I deny that there is an identity of interest between labor and capitalists,” Sylvis had explained in 1864. “Capitalists employ labor for the amount of profit realized, and working men labor for the amount of wages received. We find capitalists ever watchful of their interests—ever ready to make everything bend to their desires. Then why should not laborers be equally watchful of their interests—equally ready to take advantage of every circumstance to secure good wages and social elevation?” Sylvis was motivated by a powerful vision of a better life for the working class:
To secure these blessings, two things are absolutely necessary. We want more time and more money; fewer hours of toil, and more wages for what we do. These wants we will supply, and these evils we will remedy through the instrumentality of our organizations. We must have a thorough combination of all branches of labor. And then by cooperation we must erect our own workshops, and establish our own stores, and till our own farms, and live in our own houses—in short, we must absolutely control within ourselves the two elements of capital—labor and money. Then we will not only secure a fair standard of wages, but all the profits of our labor.
Disunity continued to plague the ranks of organized labor, however. Many workers in the NLU and in other organizations sought to ban “coolie labor” by preventing the immigration of Chinese workers. (Ironically, while most white unionists viewed Chinese workers as hopelessly docile, it was 5,000 Chinese railroad-track workers who led one of the largest strikes in this country’s history against a California firm in 1866.) Also, the NLU’s relationship with women workers was quite strained. Only two of thirty national unions (the printers and cigar makers) allowed women members. When feminist and NLU member Susan B. Anthony attempted to recruit women to gain jobs in the printing trades—as strikebreakers—male NLU members who resented her feminism leaped at the opportunity to expel her. On the other hand, the general trend of the NLU was in the direction of overcoming working-class disunity, due to the growing recognition that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Recognizing the importance of international working-class solidarity—because capitalism is a global system, workers of various countries were coming to recognize that they faced similar conditions and often the same adversaries—the NLU established contact with and considered joining the International Workingmen’s Association (the European-based “First International” led by Karl Marx). And perhaps most significantly, the NLU closely cooperated with the Colored National Labor Union which was formed in 1869. The fragility of organized labor was demonstrated, however, when the depression of 1873 allowed employers to destroy both the NLU and the CNLU.
Explosions
At times the fight against organized labor took on the quality of outright warfare. A peaceful, if radical, workers’ demonstration in New York City’s Tompkins Square calling for an end to unemployment and an eight-hour workday in 1874 drew 25,000 men, women, and children but was brutally attacked and dispersed by mounted police. Some workers were prepared to employ violence as well. In eastern Pennsylvania mining districts during the early 1870s, Irish immigrant miners were accused of fighting back against the most oppressive employers through a violent sort of guerrilla warfare: mines were blown up, mine superintendents were killed, etc. The arrest and hanging of some of the most militant of the workers’ leaders (as reflected in the film The Molly Maguires) secured a form of law and order that enabled employers to rest more easily—for a short time.
By 1877, workers had endured years of blacklisting, wage cuts, and twelve-to fourteen-hour workdays. In 1877, the Baltimore & Ohio railroad joined with three other major lines and imposed yet another wage cut. On July 16, trainmen in West Virginia struck, and the strike movement quickly spread throughout the country. As the largest and most powerful employer in the United States, for many people railroads symbolized all that was wrong with industrial America. One Pittsburgh iron worker told a mass meeting that “I won’t call employers despots, I won’t call them tyrants, but the term ‘capitalist’ is sort of synonymous and will do as well.” Local members of the state militia were too sympathetic to the workers to be used in efforts to suppress the uprising, but regiments from the other side of Pennsylvania were brought in to fire into the crowd. More than twenty workers, including three children, were killed, but the city’s enraged working people armed themselves and drove the “invaders” back. (After the great strike was over, the federal government strengthened the national guard, placing numerous armories in working-class neighborhoods.)
During the 1877 strike, employers and “respectable society” feared that they were witnessing an American version of the 1871 Paris Commune, where radical and socialist workers had taken over and run the city for several weeks (before being savagely repressed by the forces of upper-class “law and order”). U.S. employers and political leaders responded forcefully to the 1877 strike. Federal troops (some of which had been withdrawn from the South with the selling-out of Reconstruction, and some of which had been used to subdue Indians in the West) were deployed against the rebellious workers. Strikers were driven from the streets of Chicago by artillery, and in cities and towns throughout the country a pro-business version of “law and order” was imposed. But the immense ferment of the 1877 strikes lingered—vivid memories of struggle and solidarity. In St. Louis, for example, black workers on the city’s docks had waged a sympathy strike with the rail workers, and when one black striker asked a mass rally “Will you stand with us regardless of color?” the crowd cheered “We will! We will! We will!” While repression broke the strike, workers’ rising aspirations for a more just society found new outlets.
Knights of Labor
In the wake of the Great Uprising of 1877, local Labor and Greenback parties grew in strength; advocating the printing of paper money (as in the Civil War) to end the long deflationary period and push back the power of big banking interests, Greenbackers also pushed for major social reforms beneficial to workers and small farmers.*
No less important for the labor movement was the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. Formed by Uriah Stephens and others in 1869 as a secret society of tailors, in 1879 the Knights went public, by this time joined by shoe workers, machinists, coal miners, and many others. The Knights accepted all workers except lawyers, politicians, and liquor dealers. They attracted thousands of members: white and black, immigrant and native-born. Stephens’s organization was guided by the notion—practically unique on the U.S. social scene—that “the (outside) color of a [membership] candidate shall not debar him from admission; rather let the coloring of his mind and heart be the test,” and between 60,000 and 90,000 African Americans became members of the Order.
Women as well as men were active in the organization. “In all our assemblies, local, district, trade and general, woman has an equal voice, when a member, with her brother trade unionist,” one female member asserted, and while the Order was hardly free from all male supremacist attitudes, it was far ahead of its time. It encouraged women to become members, supported equal pay for equal work among women and men, favored the right to vote for women, and counted women’s rights leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton among its honored members. Historian Robert Weir has suggested that cultural differences between working-class men and women—with men worried about definitions of “manhood” and women concerned more with a sense of community—resulted in many male members involving themselves more with the Order’s rituals while female members “expressed great enthusiasm for dances, debates, socials, songfests, teas and trade fairs.” But women and men alike were especially drawn to the organization’s radical social idealism.
“We seek to raise the level of wages and reduce the hours of labor; to protect men and women in their occupations, in their lives and limbs, and in their rights as citizens,” explained the Knights’ executive board in an 1886 statement. “We also seek to secure such legislation as shall tend to prevent the unjust accumulation of wealth, to restrict the power of monopolies and corporations, and to enact such wise and beneficent legislation as shall promote equity and justice, looking to the day when cooperation shall supersede the wage system, and the castes and classes that now divide men shall be forever abolished.”
Although the Knights were not immune from the anti-Chinese campaign against “coolie labor” (even as nativist mobs attacked, beat up, and sometimes killed immigrant workers from China), the general trajectory of the Knights of Labor was to include all working people in one big organization under the slogan: “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All.” For example, the Knights provided a powerful vehicle for black-white unity. Strongest in the North, the Knights nonetheless attracted both black and white coal miners in Alabama, dockworkers in New Orleans, and tobacco workers in Virginia. In 1885, railroad members of the Knights led a successful strike against one of Jay Gould’s railroads. The solidarity that came out of the Knights proved key. Soon more than 700,000 had joined up.
The organization’s unique strengths moved it beyond workplace issues to embrace broad social aspirations and community networks of workers. Nonetheless, it was an unwieldy organization. Cooperatives were emphasized, even to the point of expelling trade unionists in the cigar trades in order to sell (below union rates) cooperatively made cigars. The leadership of the organization—centered around the Grand Master Workman of the “noble and holy order,” Terrence V. Powderly—had an expansive social vision, but also fatal impulses toward conservatism and “respectability.” Powderly believed railroad tycoon Jay Gould’s offers of friendship and “cooperation,” and the Knights were inadequately prepared for the vicious counterassault from this man who boasted, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” In 1886 their organization on the railroads was crushed. In the same period, Southern Knights were viciously race-baited. Responsibility for all forms of labor violence and the most despicable motives were laid at the Knights’ door by the powerful pro-business newspapers throughout the country.
AFL and Labor Radicalism
As the Knights were being destroyed by employers and the press, another national labor organization, the American Federation of Labor, was growing. It was chiefly made up of skilled workers, organized into tightly structured craft unions, some of whose leaders had long been active in the labor and socialist movements. (Socialists believed that the economy should be socially owned, democratically controlled, and used to meet the needs of all.) These more durable organizations—focused on improved wages and conditions at the workplace—shared a view of the world stated in the 1886 preamble of the AFL’s new constitution: “[A] struggle is going on in all the nations of the civilized world, between the oppressors and the oppressed of all countries, a struggle between the capitalist and the laborer, which grows in intensity from year to year, and will work disastrous results to the toiling millions, if they are not combined for mutual protection and benefit.”
The AFL’s immediate predecessor (the looser Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, created in 1881) had—under the inspiration of Carpenter’s union leader Peter J. McGuire—initiated a nationwide campaign for the eight-hour workday. This demand was essentially a part of workers’ struggles for control over their own lives as well as over the labor process which absorbed so much of their energy and time. The campaign included the call for a day of strikes and demonstrations on May 1, 1886. Hundreds of thousands participated throughout the country—but the strongest show of strength was in Chicago, where organized workers from both the craft unions and the Knights shut down workplaces and dominated the city’s streets.
Among the leaders of the vibrant and militant Chicago labor movement were people—such as German-born August Spies and Texas-born Albert Parsons—who at various times referred to themselves as socialists, communists, and anarchists. Distrusting politicians and governments, they argued that the working class must free itself through its own efforts, eventually overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with a “cooperative commonwealth” in which—in the words of the Communist Manifesto—“the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Such stuff was not palatable to Chicago’s employers, newspapers, and police force, who made a special target of the radical labor leaders. At a May 4 rally in Haymarket Square, violence erupted when the police moved in to break up the gathering. A bomb was thrown at the police, and the police opened fire on the crowd. A number of policemen and workers were killed. The authorities blamed the bombing on the “Chicago anarchists,” whose leaders were arrested and railroaded to the gallows in an unfair trial. Several years too late, Illinois Governor Peter Altgeld pronounced that the Haymarket Martyrs—innocent of the crime with which they were charged—had done little more than argue that the class violence of the time necessitated workers’ self-defense.
Outraged by the state-sponsored murder of labor activists, and committed to achieving an eight-hour workday and other rights for labor internationally, workers around the world made May 1 a workers holiday. Significantly, the other labor holiday—the September Labor Day later preferred by the U.S. government—had also been advanced in 1882 by the originator of May Day, labor radical P. J. McGuire.
Partly in response to the antilabor offensive, there was an upsurge of labor party activity in the late 1880s in various cities. Among the most successful efforts was that of the United Labor Party in New York—supported by the unions, various reformers, and socialists—which ran reformer Henry George for mayor in 1887. George narrowly missed winning (some suggest that the election was stolen by the Democratic Party machine), with Republican mayoral candidate Theodore Roosevelt coming in a distant third. These efforts soon evaporated, however, as factional differences erupted between the labor parties’ various constituents, and also because of fears that a fragmentation of workers between the Democrats and Republicans would be further complicated by a third Labor Party division.
And yet labor radicalism did not evaporate. In his 1893 pamphlet What Does Labor Want? AFL President Samuel Gompers expressed the views of many in emphasizing “the separation of the capitalistic class from the great laboring mass,” adding that “the capitalist class had its origins in force and fraud,” and that “this class of parasites devours incomes derived from many sources, from the stunted babies employed in the mills, mines and factories to the lessees of the gambling halls and the profits of fashionable brothels; from the lands which the labor of others had made valuable; from the royalties on coal and other miners beneath the surface and from rent of houses above the surface.” In opposition to this, Gompers believed that the working class was entitled to “the earth and the fullness thereof. There is nothing too precious, there is nothing too beautiful, too lofty, too ennobling, unless it is within the scope and comprehension of labor’s aspirations and wants.”
Gompers viewed “true trade unionists” as those “who recognize the vital, logical extension, growth, and development of all unions of all trades and callings, and who strive for the unity, federation, cooperation, fraternity, and solidarity of all organized wage-earners; who can and do subordinate self for the common good and always strive for the common uplift; who decline to limit the sphere of their activity by any dogma, doctrine, or ism.” The primary need—independent of any radical ideology—was to build strong organizations of workers in the workplaces that could draw the diverse employees into a unified effort that would compel employers to give better wages, shorter hours, and improved working conditions. When asked what the labor movement wanted, Gompers once replied simply: “More.” His view—from the 1880s until his death in the 1920s—was eloquently expressed in an early speech:
If a workingman gets a dollar and a half for ten hours’ work, he lives up to that standard of a dollar and a half, and he knows that a dollar seventy-five would improve his standard of living and he naturally strives to get that dollar and seventy-five. After that he wants two dollars and more time for leisure, and he struggles to get it. Not satisfied with two dollars he wants more; not only two and a quarter, but a nine-hour workday. And so he will keep on getting more and more until he gets it all or the full value of all he produces.
Moderation and Militancy
As time went on, however, the AFL came to represent a relatively conservative form of trade unionism. The skills and social standing of most of its members allowed them to bargain with employers about wages and working conditions. The ability of their unions to survive in the face of economic fluctuations and employer hostility was impressive, but the membership of the craft unions tended to be restricted to white males who had been born in the United States or who had immigrated years before. What’s more, presumably “utopian” ventures, like independent labor politics or cooperatives or socialist strategies, were abandoned in favor of what AFL President Gompers and others called “pure and simple unionism,” which—Gompers explained—saw the trade union itself as “the natural organization of wage workers to secure their present material and practical improvement and to achieve their final emancipation.” Although sometimes still tipping his hat to abstract socialist ideals, Gompers also referred to trade unions in nonradical terms as “the business organization of the wage earners to attend to the business of the wage earners,” and was soon denouncing socialists for seeking “to allure our movement into such a vortex of complications and capture our movement as a tail to their political kite.” He abandoned his earlier anticapitalist rhetoric and went out of his way to show employers and mainstream politicians that he was now hostile to left-wing ideologies. Yet many AFL members remained socialists, and their 1894 resolution calling for the national ownership of all industries was only narrowly defeated. Daniel DeLeon, doctrinaire chieftain of the Socialist Labor Party, castigated the AFL leaders as “labor lieutenants of capitalism.” DeLeon sought to create a rival Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance, but it was never a serious alternative to Gompers’s federation and AFL stalwarts (including many socialists) denounced it as “dual unionism.”
Under Gompers and his cothinkers, however, the House of Labor came to have little room for political radicals, or for blacks and other people of color, or most immigrants from southern or eastern Europe. In the five decades from 1870 to 1920, wave upon wave of immigrant labor inundated industrializing America, helping to decompose and recompose the U.S. working class in ways that disrupted and fragmented labor organization and class consciousness, and many in the AFL viewed this mass of newcomers as an unorganizable threat to hard-won union gains. While women of all nationalities were also excluded from many unions and labor struggles, there were some who refused to be excluded from the fight for social justice. There was the almost unstoppable Leonora O’Reilley, who organized for the Knights of Labor, the AFL’s garment workers, and later the Women’s Trade Union League. And there was the tough-as-nails but grandmotherly organizer for the United Mine Workers, “Mother” Mary Jones, exulting that “women in the industrial field have begun to awaken to their condition of slavery . . . and they gave battle fearlessly. . . . Never can a complete victory be won until the woman awakens to her condition.”
As it turned out, neither maleness nor skill nor white skin nor “respectability” would necessarily protect AFL members from the greed of employers. In 1892, Andrew Carnegie attempted to introduce new technology that would weaken craft workers’ control over the Homestead, Pennsylvania steel mill. He and his top manager, Henry Clay Frick, then used a lockout to break the union altogether. But the unionized skilled workers had gathered the support of the local government and most of the unskilled, largely Slavic workforce. In a violent and determined struggle, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, in alliance with the less skilled non-unionized workers and the entire community of Homestead, succeeded in repulsing several hundred armed Pinkerton guards hired to ensure operationsof the steel works on a non-union basis. Seven workers and three Pinkertons were killed, and many others injured in the “Battle of Homestead.” The Pennsylvania militia then did the job of breaking the workers’ struggle. Labor’s defeat had a devastating impact on the quality of life, the dignity, and the democratic rights of the working class. Visiting Homestead a year later, the noted writer Hamlin Garland observed that it was “as squalid and unlovely as could well be imagined, and the people were mainly of the discouraged and sullen type to be found everywhere where labor passes into the brutalizing stage of severity,” adding: “Such towns are sown thickly over the hill-lands of Pennsylvania.” Victorious Carnegie’s profits soared, protected by a spy system that fingered and blacklisted unionists. By the early 1900s, Mother Jones succinctly characterized the political impact of the economic dictatorship: “The class that owns the [industrial] machine owns the government, it owns the governors, it owns the courts and it owns the public officials all along the line.”
The craft organization of the AFL worked well in the building trades. There, craft unionists could impose work rules and raise wages. Union workers in other trades bought union-made products (such as cigars) and boycotted non-union products or those built with prison labor, calling on all workers to buy only “union label” products. But by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the strategy involving a different union for each job or “craft” was being outflanked in modern industries which combined new technologies and mass production techniques that undermined the power of skilled workers and blurred distinctions between skilled and unskilled. A few unions, such as the United Mine Workers, attempted to organize all the employees in an industry, regardless of their job. Similar efforts were soon made in the garment industry as well.
One of the most dramatic examples of intercraft solidarity came in the early 1890s when over 150,000 railroad workers joined the American Railway Union led by Eugene Victor Debs. Industrial organization and solidarity bested the Great Northern line in 1894. Later that year, ARU members supported the strike of workers who built Pullman railroad cars. ARU members refused to couple any Pullman cars to trains, and half a million railroad workers were idled. Railroad companies got a federal judge to issue an injunction effectively outlawing the ARU boycott of Pullman cars. Then the government placed U.S. mail onto Pullman cars. Debs and other unionists were jailed while federal troops attacked strikers. Fearful of risking its own existence in this mighty confrontation, the AFL refused to support the ARU and the boycott, resulting in the collapse of the strike and the rail union.
Robber Barons and Economic Expansionism
The Homestead and Pullman strikes were reflections of larger developments in U.S. society, especially in the economy. The rise of big business corporations made possible the immense reorganization, the enlarged scale, the far-reaching interconnection of economic enterprises that greatly raised efficiency and productivity. New technology and work methods were developed to enhance the employers’ control of the labor process at the workplace—often by utilizing “scientific management” methods pioneered by Frederick W. Taylor. This broke down workers’ skills, subordinated them to the will of tough-minded corporation managers, speeded up their work, and helped to break their unions and cut their wages.
At the same time, the growth of industry meant more jobs, lower prices for consumer goods, and a growing array of products that profoundly altered and seemed to improve Americans’ way of life—and this, in turn, attracted new waves of immigrants seeking a better life than they could find in Ireland, in southern and eastern Europe, in Asia, in Mexico, etc. Yet the new economic developments destroyed smaller businesses, brought small farmers to the brink of ruin thanks to the callous policies of banks and big corporations that dominated the agricultural sectors of the economy. And “industrial progress” made workers more vulnerable than ever to the power of their employers. The economic leaders of the corporate economy—people like Morgan and Mellon in banking, Rockefeller in oil and coal, Carnegie and Frick in steel, Gould and Hill in rail, Swift and Armour in meatpacking, etc.—were seen as “robber barons” by the many who were victimized as a result of their spectacular profiteering.
In 1890, the richest 9 percent of the population owned 71 percent of the nation’s wealth (with the .03 percent who were millionaires enjoying 20 percent). A 39 percent middle layer of the population had 24 percent of the wealth, and the bottom 52 percent of the population had only 5 percent of the wealth. An indignant South Dakota Senator R. F. Pettigrew (a maverick Republican) commented that this translated politically into “rule by and for the rich.” It also translated into many hardships for the majority of the people.
Sometimes the quest for profits through rising productivity resulted in overproduction—a glut on the market of products which couldn’t be sold, resulting in large-scale business failures and massive unemployment: economic depression. While such depressions were disasters for most of the population, they enabled the more powerful corporations to become more dominant forces in the economy, with the elimination of their less efficient competitors. More than this, as we have seen, the economic power translated into political power, and the big corporations became profoundly influential at all levels of government and in both major political parties. Denouncing such “plutocracy” (rule by the rich), radicalized small farmers spearheaded the Populist movement—which attracted many workers and some unions (the Knights of Labor, the ARU, and others)—in an effort to end the domination of big business and give power to America’s laboring majority. Populists first won electoral successes through their own party, then put all their eggs into the basket of the Democratic Party—whose presidential campaign of William Jennings Bryan was crushed in 1896 by the much more powerful, hugely financed campaign of Republican William McKinley. Over the next few decades, the bulk of small farmers who had made up the main Populist base were eliminated as an independent economic and political force.
Business and political leaders recognized, however, that general economic prosperity had to be provided if the sort of discontent represented by labor radicals and Populists was to be kept under control. Economic expansion overseas—to secure more markets for U.S. goods, plentiful raw materials for U.S. industries, and new investment opportunities for U.S. businessmen—was seen as one of the keys to economic prosperity in the United States. The consequence was a U.S. foreign policy designed to advance such economic goals, and intensified “patriotic” campaigns to support the military muscle sometimes needed to back all of this up.
An early result was what McKinley’s secretary of the navy (and later his vice president and his presidential successor) Theodore Roosevelt termed a “splendid little war” against Spain, to push this antiquated rival out of the way in the Caribbean and the Philippines. With relatively little loss of U.S. lives, Cuba was “liberated” from Spanish rule and placed under U.S. “protection,” and Puerto Rico became an outright colony. The Philippines—after U.S. soldiers went on to fight a brutal four-year “dirty war” to prevent Filipinos from establishing the first republic in Asia—also became a U.S. possession.
Some trade unionists (including the AFL’s Samuel Gompers) joined with other reformers to form an “Anti-Imperialist League” in opposition to such policies—but nothing could prevent the inexorable economic expansionism. As in earlier “Indian wars,” most of the benefits went to land speculators and corporations that established sugar and pineapple plantations. U.S. leaders were not inclined, however, to build a colonial empire. They preferred, through a judicious mix of “dollar diplomacy” and “gunboat diplomacy,” to maintain an “Open Door” policy that would give American businesses access to markets, resources, and investment opportunities in a variety of foreign climes.
* Deflation—the increase in the value of the dollar, which meant a decline in prices—especially hit hard the masses of debt-ridden farmers in the post–Civil War years. The inflationary expansion of paper currency (“greenbacks”) was seen as helping the small farmer as well as supplying more capital that would stimulate economic growth. This economic growth, it was presumed, would be helpful to manufacturers as well as industrial workers—who were seen (along with the farmers) as “the producing classes,” as opposed to the powerful bankers and financiers who preferred a “tight currency.” Many of the Greenback reformers made special appeals to workers and the labor movement by connecting the issue of currency reform to pro-labor rhetoric and social reforms. Many labor radicals, especially socialists and advocates of the eight-hour workday, viewed “greenbackism” as a diversion for the workers.