Around lunchtime on Saturday, July 23, 1892, a clean-shaven and slender young man walked into the Fifth Avenue Pittsburgh office of Henry Clay Frick, the executive head of the famed Carnegie firms. He had arrived two days earlier from the apartment he lived in on 42nd Street in New York City and registered at the Merchants Hotel under the name “Simon Bachmann.” He had already tried a number of times, unsuccessfully, to gain access and have an audience with Frick in his large private office in the Hussey Building, a workspace complete with a large bay window overlooking the avenue. The visitor, dressed in a light suit and wearing a brown derby hat, handed the office boy his card that, written in pencil, read “Alexander Berkman, Agent New York Employment Company.” Around 1:45 pm, he was allowed to see the noted executive, who was fresh from his usual lunch at the exclusive Duquesne Club. He sat at his desk in the back of the room, wearing his normal black beard and fine clothes. Berkman nervously swung open the door and walked into Frick’s office, which was washed in midday sunlight. Frick looked up from the papers that busied him on his large oak desk only to discover Berkman, who managed to say “Fr-” as his eyes met Frick’s in a moment of understanding of what was about to happen. Berkman, about 25 ft. away, then fired two shots from his pistol. The bullets from the .38 caliber handgun struck Frick, causing him to exclaim, reportedly, “murder … help!”
Vice chairman John Leishman, whose desk sat near Frick’s, jumped on Berkman and attempted to wrestle the assassin to the ground. Yet Berkman had already produced a dagger, surprisingly freed himself (he weighed only 114 pounds and stood 5'4"), and plunged the knife into dazed Frick’s side. The entire attack unfolded in front of Frick’s large office windows, so hundreds of shocked onlookers standing on the street below saw most of the scrum. They saw police, office clerks, and workmen combine to overcome and subdue Berkman. A police officer, grabbing Berkman’s head by his hair, held his head up to face the bleeding Frick and asked “Mr. Frick, do you identify this man as your assailant?” which was met with an affirmative nod. Berkman mentioned to the officer that he had lost his glasses in the scuffle, to which the uniformed man responded, “You’ll be damn lucky if you don’t lose your head.”1
When police officers brought Berkman outside, chants from the crowd called for his head. “Hang him to the lamp post!” yelled one onlooker. Cool and collected, though according to the press he appeared “bordering on the verge of stupidity,” the blood-covered Berkman was brought to the police station and saw several rounds of questioning. During a physical search, authorities discovered under his tongue a small copper tube containing dynamite, precisely the type of cartridge used in 1887 by Chicago anarchist Louis Lingg to kill himself the day before his execution. Berkman’s further plotting thwarted, police continued the interrogation, and he remained indifferent, refusing to mention any organizational affiliations and only calmly stating he had come to Pittsburgh with the sole intent of killing Frick.
Authorities and newspapers revealed who Berkman was: a 22-year- old who had emigrated to the United States only a few years earlier, in 1888, at age 17. Berkman found early employment as a compositor in Johann Most’s, an anarchist of growing fame, New York office on 167 William Street, and worked there from April 1 to July 4, 1891. Berkman then spent a stint at the Singer sewing machine factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and then a printing office in New Haven, Connecticut, before finding later work as a cigar maker and printer. At the time of the Frick attack, he had been living in New York City, and this young extremist had just tried to kill one of America’s most famous business leaders. Miraculously, Frick survived the attack. Doctors ably removed the two bullets from the base of his skull and bandaged his wounds. Frick even dictated a telegram to Andrew Carnegie that afternoon, promising the magnate that all was well. Despite a stifling summer heat wave during those July days, doctors kept Frick comfortable, so much so that he remained restless during his recovery, even expressing regret and disappointment he could not get back to his day-to-day duties immediately.2
What did the Frick assassination attempt mean? For Berkman’s part, he proudly labeled his attempt on Frick’s life as “the first terrorist act in America,” raising the eye, and fears, of many. Yet, others were not so celebratory. The press pointed out that Berkman seemed to be a devotee of the suspicious Johann Most, and when they dug deeper into the story, Berkman himself was “known as an anarchist tramp … a wild and irresponsible fanatic.” Yet Berkman, who would live and work in San Francisco years later, was only beginning a long career of radicalism, a reactionism endemic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3
Why did Berkman make Frick a target? The short answer was that Frick stood center stage in one of the most significant labor battles from earlier that year: the Homestead Strike. Part of the much broader struggle and fight between capital and labor at the time, it had unfolded earlier in 1892. Pennsylvania, in part because the state passed a law in 1891 safeguarding unions and permitting strikes, had been a hotbed for labor unrest during the last decades of the nineteenth century, so much so that one in four U.S. strikes happened there between 1881 and 1905. These tensions boiled over during the Homestead Strike that summer of 1892, and Frick attempted to both break the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW) and flatly refused to negotiate terms with the union. Many reading the newspaper accounts of the assassination attempt might have readily remembered the connection between Frick, labor, and someone like Berkman, described in the dailies as a “blood thirsty … Russian nihilist.” Berkman’s frustration and radicalization had unquestionably stemmed, in no small part, from a seminal event that same summer.4
When the Homestead Affair boiled over in 1892, Berkman was working at a lunch parlor in Worcester, Massachusetts. When he was not standing over a grill or serving customers their drinks, Berkman’s thoughts drifted to the plight of the working class and his developing dreams of anarchism. In fact, he moved to Worcester with the intent of saving enough money for a return to Russia, a place where he felt his revolutionary attitudes could be best employed. For Berkman and many radicals, Homestead was nothing short of what historians Miriam Brody and Bonnie Buettner called “a call to arms,” and Berkman followed the Homestead events closely. He vividly remembered, in fact, sitting in the back of his flat on July 6, 1892, when his ideological ally and lover Emma Goldman, waving a newspaper, told him that amid the strike at Homestead, Pinkertons had shot women and children. Snatching the paper from her, he recalled, he read details of the Carnegie Company’s fight with the AAISW there, the tales of Pinkertons brought in under the cover of night, and the battles that unfolded.5
Alexander Berkman, then, plotting with his accomplice Emma Goldman, hoped to assassinate Frick for not only the industrialists’ role in cracking down on the Homestead Strike but also as a blow against what Berkman perceived as a broader American capitalism gone awry. Their plans were not perfect: Berkman initially thought he might use a bomb but discovered he was not equipped for bomb making and Goldman initially planned to pay for the operation through prostitution but, like Berkman’s bomb making, failed.6
The Frick-Berkman affair undeniably represented a wider national climate of uncertainty and distrust. The events in Pennsylvania were no different than things in the rest of the country, signaling a long and unsettled history.
Ever since the days of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the U.S. economy had eased into and embraced an unregulated free market capitalistic system. On the surface, this model allowed the economy to grow unchecked for decades, with particular acceleration after the Civil War (1861–1865), bringing great industrial expansion and economic growth. Fueled by technological advance and mechanization, American industrialization quickened. Inventions like the incandescent light bulb now allowed factory work to no longer be limited by daylight, and employees could engage in shift work through the night. Originating in England, the Bessemer process—which shot a cold blast into iron and forged stronger steel—saw widespread usage, and the nation’s new skyscrapers could now rise skyward. Mechanization, standardized parts, and automation all accelerated production. Companies looked for new and pioneering ways to govern all aspects of production, too, to save on costs and heighten production. Concepts like vertical integration allowed industries like steel and later car manufacturing to control manufacturing from start to finish, reducing overheard and increasing efficiency along the way. The American business world got smaller. Vast new transportation networks, and especially the railroads (which had over 250,000 miles of track by 1916), facilitated the shipment of goods quickly and across the country. Communication enabled quicker contact, too, and by 1900, there were 1 million miles of telegraph wire handling 63 million messages per year.7
Controlling much of this new Progressive Era economy were a legal reality called “trusts.” Initially the brainchild of Standard Oil lawyer Samuel Dodd, trusts (and later, a new and clever workaround called “holding companies”) allowed companies to own smaller ones. This classification made it perfectly legal for corporate behemoths to exercise monopolistic control over certain industries and commodities. Between 1897 and 1904, and certainly not only during this particularly excessive period, thousands of smaller businesses disappeared as the great merger movement created vertically and horizontally integrated corporate giants. Before long, there were the famous steel and oil trusts, but also a beef trust, a sugar trust, and more emerged on the scene. By 1904, trusts or single monopolistic companies dominated at least 50 major industries in the United States.
At the center for these corporate giants were business giants themselves. The so-called “captains of industry,” as we may know them, emerged like steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Financiers like J.P. Morgan made fortunes purely by buying and selling other companies. He showed that creditors and intermediaries could now flex their financial muscle in the developing climate. He famously bought Carnegie Steel in 1901, and with one exchange via telegram, created a new corporate titan: U.S. Steel, America’s first billion-dollar company. These kinds of dealings did not go unnoticed, though, and a 1912 Congressional committee study of the swelling “House of Morgan” revealed that the financial conglomerate owned stakes in a stunning 112 corporations, with total assets valued at $22 billion. Company heads and entrepreneurs accumulated mass wealth during this period. Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller, for example, retired in 1897 with a fortune of $900 million, all in an age before a federal income tax.
Still, in the age of Social Darwinism, many would not have resented the financial success of entrepreneurs and the mega wealthy. In fact, many on the lower end of the financial scale would have believed in the hopeful messages of Horatio Alger stories they may have read, tales that made clear how anyone in the United States, regardless of their current status, could “make it” if they worked hard enough. These beliefs in “rags to riches” stories and their potential were, and are, at the heart of Americanness.
Helping to push the American economy at the time was an agreeable and affordable labor force. Not only did the U.S. population double between 1870 and 1890 (from 38 to 76 million), but much of that population explosion also consisted of newcomers to the United States. Indeed, from 1871 to 1901, 11.7 million, most from Europe and Asia, came to American shores, providing ready and willing workers. The previous “old” wave immigration, with most of the newcomers arriving from Northern and Western Europe, gave way to a larger, and much more distinct, cadre of foreigners. The “new” immigrant of the late nineteenth century—unique and, for some, ominous—increasingly came from Southern and Eastern Europe. The new American immigrants of the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras brought languages, customs, and religions dramatically dissimilar to the traditions of the white American Christian majority.
On the surface, the United States has long celebrated its image as a “melting pot,” where immigrants of all stripes were not only welcomed but also, in many cases, desired. Certainly, more than a few celebrated the new American immigrant and what they added to society. Norman Hopgood, writing in The Menorah Journal in 1916, announced, “Democracy will be more productive if it has a tendency to encourage differences. Our dream of the United States ought not to be a dream of monotony.” Similarly, essayist and social critic Randolph Bourne, in his essay on “Transnational America,” wrote “Let us make something of this trans-national spirit instead of outlawing it,” urging the citizenry to embrace the new “cosmopolitan America.”8
Concern, however, continued to surround the dangers of this swelling immigrant population. Certainly, after Berkman’s assassination attempt, the “typical” bomb-throwing, European, anarchist immigrant caused great concern. “Anarchists from Europe Must Be Refused Landing” read one headline, as the possibility of immigration reform saw discussion. The Commissioner of Immigration (and former Knights of Labor head) Terence Powderly asked in his annual reports for Congress to consider laws adding anarchists to those denied admission to the United States. He also proposed that anyone attending anarchist meetings be “taken out” and, if they had alien status, deported. Making plain the connection between immigrants and “troublemakers,” the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury called for more Secret Service agents and their powers extended to combat plots, presumably by immigrants, against the government.9
Indeed, notable about the Frick/Berkman affair, though, was how Berkman’s ethnicity, and the subsequent fear of similarly radical and violent Jews, featured prominently. The day after the attack, The Pittsburgh Dispatch described Berkman, already in custody, as a “Russian Hebrew Nihilist.” The paper made important, then, the fact that Berkman was a wild-eyed Jewish radical, and its physical description mentioned that he “looked like a crank or a fanatic,” with a “dull and stolid” face. This representation is significant, in correlating Berkman’s Jewishness with radical and undesirable qualities. Criminality and radicalism intersected, too, fueling the willingness of some to further generalize about American Jews. The Berkman example came to symbolize what many presumed was a typical and widespread radical American Jewish agitator.10
By the 1890s, the United States had begun an unprecedented period of economic growth, spurred by new technology and modernization. On the one hand, the late-nineteenth-century American economy had produced unprecedented wealth and excess. Indeed, and probably much to the chagrin of America’s ordinary workers who might have struggled with a living wage (particularly amid the Depression of the 1890s), there was the extravagance openly exhibited by the nation’s elite. In 1897, in New York City, Cornelia and Bradley Martin threw a party at the Waldorf Hotel that intentionally hoped to replicate the grandeur of France’s Louis XIVth’s palace and court at Versailles. In 1902, with a similar display of overindulgence, Charles Schwab, the then-president of U.S. Steel, made a much-publicized gambling trip to Monaco. Yet, the era was simultaneously and undeniably a time of a widening wealth gap, and for some observers, this alarming and widening rich-poor gap may have signaled capitalism doing its worst.11
Unregulated economic growth and exploitive business practices, of course, came with consequences and pushback. Despite the economic success of those at the top of the economic ladder, rights for workers and rank-and-file laborers left much to be desired. A turbulent relationship between capital and labor emerged, then, and laborers, leftists, and radicals began to resist this new and emerging industrial order.
By 1900, the majority of the nation’s population could be considered part of the working class. The rights of workers, not surprisingly, stood as a central issue during the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Between 36 and 40 million laborers performed wage work. These workers worked long days for low wages and very poor pay. The average manufacturing salary at the turn of the century, in fact, was $435 per year. Pay could be scanter for those in other professions. Coal miners, for example, earned around $340 per year, domestic employees $240, and agricultural workers only about $178. The reality of the working class seemed a far cry from the Martins’ lavish theme parties. Specifically, the typical worker could expect to work ten hours a day, six days a week, all for a wage of between $.10 and $.20 an hour. To make things worse, low wages and long days were coupled with very unsafe working conditions, across many professions. For example, 1-in-26 railroad workers were injured each year, and 1-in-399 were killed. The eight-hour day, a cause for progressive labor reformers, was only a scant hope during the period, so they could also work long days in these conditions. The famous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City, the most notorious example of workplace abuses, meant dozens of deaths. Managers had locked the doors to prevent breaks, and when a fire accidentally broke out, the flames and smoke took the lives of 146 garment workers (123 women and 23 men) trapped inside. The event accelerated the 1900 formation of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and also precipitated the founding of the New York Factory Investigating Commission (FIC). The FIC conducted inquiries in nine cities, held public hearings, and proposed 15 new laws on reform issues, such as restricting work hours for women and children, issues of work-related injuries, sanitation, and safety conditions.12
Unfortunately for women in the workplace, they also encountered unkind everyday work conditions. During the Progressive Era, women accounted for one-fourth of the workforce, yet earned about one-fourth of what their male counterparts earned. Children, often at work to help with family obligations, worked with only early and limited child labor laws. Their own employment “advantages” (being able to work for less pay and having the size and dexterity to work in certain trades and fix machinery) made children susceptible, too. In the absence of age requirements and prior to mandatory education rules, child labor remained a problem. In fact, the number of employed child laborers tripled during the Progressive Era. Established in 1904, the National Child Labor Committee began taking on unfair child labor practices. In 1916, they managed the passage of the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, the first national legislation to not only limit children’s work hours but also penalize employers for the use of child labor.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the Progressive Era, with labor reform a piece of it, would take on this division of labor and capital and work to regulate state and society for fairness, social justice, community protection, and more. One of the central elements of the Progressive Era and its reform was a new eagerness to use government intervention as an agent for change. President Theodore Roosevelt enjoys the reputation as a boundless “trustbuster,” and this credit is not unfounded; he initiated 45 antitrust cases invoking the Sherman Antitrust Act. But William Howard Taft did just as much, if not more, and later took on U.S. Steel in 1911. The government used the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, with varied degrees of success, to break up trust agreements. The government also regulated business with new tariffs. The graduated federal income tax, adopted as the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, took another swipe at the unencumbered accumulation of wealth. Aimed at the wealthiest Americans, it began at 1 percent and could reach 7 percent if one’s income was above $500,000, an exorbitant amount at the time.
Outside of regulatory reformers, a wide array of thinkers and theorists pondered the new state of the American economy, offering sometimes solutions and at other points, outward critiques in their various books. Charles Beard, arguably the most famous historian of the time, wrote a dramatic and damning reinterpretation of the nation’s economic origins. His 1913 book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States contended that the framers of the Constitution, themselves landed and privileged, crafted the document to protect their economic interests. Political economist Henry George proposed the single tax idea in his book Progress and Poverty, and he hoped his ideas would lessen the nation’s swelling wealth inequality. He specifically suggested a tax on land values, and this tax revenue alone would be sufficient to equalize wages and profits, he said, and would stimulate industry and trade and thus relieve poverty. Finally, the famed journeyman economist Thorstein Veblen penned his famous The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899. In it, he satirized America’s business moguls and accused their monopolistic methods of “capitalistic sabotage.” His ideas of pecuniary emulation and conspicuous consumption pointed out how Americans in this era were spending money to mimic the lifestyles of the wealthy and buying certain items often just for social status.
Perhaps the book with the most resounding and lasting legacy on readers at the time was not a treatise on political economy or taxation, but a novel. Many were taken by Edward Bellamy’s 1888 book, Looking Backward, a story with a much broader message of societal transformation.
The novel chronicled Boston in 1887, with the wealthy Julian West seeking help for insomnia. After hypnosis, and a fire, he sleeps for 113 years in a chamber, only to awaken in the year 2000. The worst parts of the nineteenth-century U.S. West remembered—corporate greed, disparate wealth, and working class struggles—had withered away, and instead the modern and futuristic Boston was a fairer and more just society.
Bellamy hailed from Chicopee, Massachusetts, and came from a religious family: his father and father-in-law were both ministers. In his youth, he had studied some law but became a journalist and found himself back in Massachusetts, writing for the Springfield Union. He spent some time in Hawaii to help with the tuberculosis he contracted at age 25 (which ultimately killed him at age 48). To help with his stress, he decided on his return that he would take on personal writing instead of journalism. When he wrote Looking Backward in 1888, he thought the book more of a literary fantasy than a contribution to social reform. The book, though, had tremendous and unanticipated reach. Not since Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a novel reached such a wide audience and been received in broader political ways. The book’s reception allowed Bellamy to become a national figure and one of the prophets of a new industrial order.
Most remarkable about the book, though, was how it grew as a source of inspiration for social and political organizations. The so-called “Bellamyites” talked about the tome, inspired by its optimism. As a result, the idea of Bellamy Clubs spread, with Boston organizers writing to Bellamy himself about their idea, to which he replied: “Go ahead by all means and do it if you can find anyone to associate with. No doubt eventually the formation of such Nationalist Clubs or associations among our sympathizers all over the country will be a proper measure and it is fitting that Boston should lead off in this movement.” So, a Bellamy Nationalist Club formed in 1888 and they quickly spread across the country, no greater than the original Boston club, and Bellamy himself joined them for their third meeting. About 165 clubs emerged (The Nationalist paper, written by and for Bellamyites, would claim 500 clubs). The ultimate goal for the clubs was to put Bellamy’s book into action, with the belief that American society could be reconstructed to conform to a new social ideal of brotherhood, cooperation, and fairness. Bellamy Club members were often middle class, reformers, and sometimes Theosophists, an earlier organization founded in New York City in 1875 to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity (“without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color”) to encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science, and to investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man.13
Around the world, a widening wealth gap, broadly, and the plight of workers, specifically, received comment and critique. Even Pope Leo XIII wrote, not accidentally given the contexts of the time, in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (“On the Condition of Workers”) that “the oppressed workers, above all, ought to be liberated from the savagery of greedy men, who inordinately use human beings as things for gain.” More radical observers like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had long noticed and they had said something altogether different about the relationship between capital and labor.
Undeniably, during the late nineteenth century, American workers found themselves working long days, for low wages, and sometimes in dangerous conditions. Laborers in the United States found their strongest and most frequent response to these conditions in unionization. Powerful unions formed to represent a marginalized working class. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the Knights of Labor emerged as the first national U.S. union power. Established in 1869 by nine Philadelphia tailors, the Knights of Labor intended to offer U.S. workers the first chance at one, great working-class brotherhood. Led by Terence V. Powderly, a former mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the Knights abandoned their early days of secrecy and welcomed workers regardless of race, sex, or skill. The Knights saw their numbers swell and boasted approximately 725,000 skilled and nonskilled labor members by 1886.14
The 1886 Haymarket affair, though, tarnished the organization’s reputation and in many ways labor’s reputation nationally. Beginning with a planned strike on May 1, 1886, the Knights of Labor and other unions launched a new campaign to reduce the workday to eight hours, with between 250,000 and 500,000 workers participating across the country. Previous reform attempts for the eight-hour day had proved unsuccessful, and certainly radical voices began demanding more forceful approaches. Led by mostly German-American socialists and anarchists, Chicago workers held their rally on May 1, too, as part of this ongoing strike for the eight-hour workday. Chief among the organizers were Albert Parsons, August Spies, Michael Schwab, and Samuel Fielden. While initially there was a crowd of 40,000 workers, socialists, and anarchists, its ranks expanded to 80,000. Beyond the calls for an eight-hour day at the beginning of May, the gathering of Chicago’s laborers also coincided with and continued an almost three-month-old, largely peaceful, strike against the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, who had been employing scabs to keep its doors open. On May 3, as replacement workers came off of their shifts, strikers challenged them. The police intervened, however, killing two workers. The deaths at the McCormick Reaper Works obviously brought indignation from the city’s populace, especially among workers.
Capitalizing on the tragedy, Chicago’s radicals planned their response. Helping to incite tension was the Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers’ Times), a daily Chicago newspaper published only in German and also known for its anarchist leanings. The paper reprinted many of the varied calls to arms, some of which included appeals to workers to “arm themselves” and “appear in full force.” In the basement of Greif’s Hall, a saloon in the city, plans to strike back at the city’s police and fire departments were hatched for a mass response protest the next day, and by the evening of Tuesday, May 4, 1886, a number of speeches occurred without incident (and interestingly, not actually in the Haymarket; instead, it occurred just off Randolph Street). However, almost 200 police officers arrived on the scene as Samuel Fielden, an English-born minister, socialist, and anarchist, was finishing his remarks to the gathered workers. At around 10:30 pm, Captain William Ward of the Chicago police commanded the crowd to disband. At that moment, a homemade bomb was thrown, though it remained a mystery by whom, toward his officers, creating chaos and ultimately killing 5 men in uniform and injuring approximately 60 others.
In a common Gilded Age refrain, the Chicago press casted blame upon the city’s “radicals,” but especially the city’s immigrant-heavy, socialist, anarchist elements. In response, police rounded up all of the city’s known anarchists, notably Albert Parsons, an anarchist and socialist from Texas, and August Spies, a labor organizer who had spoken at the rally not long before the blast. Not surprisingly, the city prosecutor successfully argued before the jury to levy and retain life sentences upon Parsons, Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer. On November 11, 1887, all four were executed. Louis Lingg, another convicted anarchist, committed suicide in jail. Many others served years behind bars.15
The Knights of Labor had their moment on the American labor scene, but Haymarket had left open the opportunity for another large unionization effort. Organizers created the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1881, a larger and more permanent trade union that took on only those deemed as skilled workers. Various trade unions became affiliated with the AFL, from blacksmiths to glove workers to railway clerks. The consummate face of the AFL, Samuel Gompers (he headed the organization from 1886 to 1924) preached his philosophy of “more”: better wages, favorable work conditions, and agreeable work hours, especially the dream of an eight-hour workday. In 1890, when the government first began monitoring workers’ hours, the average workweek for full-time manufacturing and those working in skill trades exceeded 100 hours. A key part of Gompers’s plan was to harness the power of labor’s most effective tool, the strike. The AFL organized 1 million workers by 1900. Their brand of “bread and butter unionism” typified labor’s demands for more than a generation. While unions only accounted for approximately less than 10 percent of the workforce, by 1901, 1,125,000 American workers belonged to a union, a marked increased from 447,000 only four years earlier. Outside of more traditional union activity, further radical labor forces also organized during the Progressive Era. The Western Federation of Miners (WFM), established in 1893 after recent tensions in Northern Idaho, and its founders envisioned the new miner’s union as a western, and radical, alternative to the AFL. The WFM had key labor battles in Cripple Creek, Colorado, in 1894 and Telluride, Colorado, in 1901.
Politically, however, both the Knights of Labor and the AFL did their best to stay out of the explicitly political fray. An AFL foray into running union candidates in 1906, which proved a failure, was an isolated exception. Instead, American unions and their leaders elected to endorse, across party lines, “prolabor” nominees for office. Indeed, as Democrats and Republicans both wooed labor voters, political opportunities emerged by the turn of the twentieth century.16
While they failed to gain much traction during his life (he died penniless) and the mid-nineteenth century, the ideas of Karl Marx on collective ownership, state socialism, and necessity of emancipating an alienated working class steadily gained particular traction in Europe, and Russia’s 1917 Revolution would embody Marxist teaching. For some on the political left and keen to the interests of labor, Marx had political possibilities on American shores, too.
In 1848, Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels had famously penned The Communist Manifesto. A direct appeal to all workers, this polemical document called for the emancipation of the working class, as a movement coming from workers themselves. They believed that capitalism and its prejudiced division of wealth contradicted decency. Capitalism, not surpassingly, they thought, was on its way to collapse. Marx believed, as a historian, philosopher, and economist, in his worldview that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” He thought that material goods were necessary to human life and determined all social life, an idea called Historical Materialism. For Marx and Engels, class struggle (which was historical and inevitable) meant that capitalism, sooner or later, would be forced to give way to socialism, his fifth mode of production. His historically minded modes of production were as follows: Primitive Communities, Slave States, Feudal States, and Capitalism. Eventually he thought that Communism (an economic and political stage following socialism, where social class ceases to exist) would come, with the abolition of private property central to this revolution in state and society. Workers, unified as unions and as a worker’s party, could bring the revolution that seized both the government and production.1
1 See Eduardo del Rio, Marx for Beginners (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976).
By the late nineteenth century, “socialism,” as a radical social and political alternative, enjoyed a growing prominence in the United States. On Puget Sound and in the Midwest, some socialists ventured into separatist and utopian colonies, often drawing inspiration from some of the utopian theorists of the age like Charles Fourier and Edward Bellamy. Plagued by logistical, leadership, and membership problems, however, few of these nineteenth-century colony experiments saw any long-term permanency. It is also important to differentiate between anarchism and socialism, though critics of the radical left were quick to equate the two. Many of the uninformed, often sitting in jury boxes, might have thought they were one and the same. Still, cooperative colonies offered socialism in practice, whatever their success.17
Politically, socialism effectively began in 1877 with the foundation of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) in the United States. The SLP was an unwavering and radical party. While it struggled for members and mass appeal, it had the fiery Daniel DeLeon at its helm. The largest challenges for the SLP and its possibilities for a wider appeal were a dogmatic and unwavering view of Marxism and its primarily Bohemian/European membership. Most of the SLP’s meetings, for example, were held entirely in German.
In 1901, socialists gathered from across the country and from many various factions to form a new, cohesive socialist party. They came from a number of various socialist organizations, but in particular DeLeon’s SLP, the Social Democratic Party of Eugene Debs (which had focused some of its work on colonies in the West), and radical-minded trade unionists. Billed as the “unity convention,” delegates descended upon Indianapolis and founded the “Socialist Party of America” (SPA).
From the start, and as intended, the new SPA represented a singular, strong voice for American Marxism and presented itself as a “typically American party.” While other socialist voices like the more radical SLP persisted, it provided the political “harmony” many wished for, finally bringing together a variety of socialist voices. Now, chapters (as the party called them, in the familiar language and in clear reference to union organizations), formed under the auspices of the national party organization, flowered. Organizers optimistically hoped that the SPA would prove a legitimate, permanent, and radical alternative to the Democratic and Republican (and, they said, capitalist) party stronghold on U.S. politics. Steady and increasing success from 1901 to 1918 encouraged this hopefulness.
Indeed, and with the combination of an increasingly organized, optimistic, and professional party, and the favorable labor conditions for such a movement, the SPA began to experience electoral wins. In Butte, Montana, the predominately miner-heavy electorate voted Lewis J. Duncan their mayor in 1911. A former Unitarian minister and a Shakespeare tutor, he received the largest plurality ever in a Butte mayoral election. Duncan became a national figure for the party, and wins followed elsewhere. In 1910, in Wisconsin, a state with an important and vocal labor voice, voters elected Socialist Victor Berger to the state’s fifth congressional district. Now, the SPA was sending party regulars to Washington D.C. to take seats in Congress, no small achievement.
SPA partisans were perpetually optimistic, often writing and saying that the next election would bring the sweeping socialist victories they always expected. “Socialists,” the Appeal to Reason declared, “are not pessimists.” Believing that victories were around the next corner fueled activism, and many party partisans believed in “municipal socialism” strategies, meaning that smaller local victories would gather momentum toward larger and more significant ones. Party propaganda and the socialist press played a particularly strong role in the optimism surrounding party growth, and publications like the International Socialist Review and Appeal to Reason dutifully tracked labor issues, party organizing, and campaigns. “Subscription hustlers,” as papers called them, worked tirelessly to increase subscribers.
On the national stage, momentum seemed with the SPA, as they worked tirelessly at national elections. One of the political advantages the SPA enjoyed was leadership; Eugene V. Debs emerged as the party’s perennial presidential candidate. Each time they selected Debs as their nominee, and in every election cycle, he garnered more votes. Debs received approximately 86,000 in 1900, 402,000 in 1904, and 420,000 in 1908; Debs’ candidacy reached its apex in 1912, when he received over 900,000 votes. Displaying the characteristically exuberant enthusiasm of party regulars, the Socialist Commonwealth in Everett, Washington, proclaimed, “this is our year,” and the upward voting trends reinforced party optimism, echoed by the Appeal to Reason, that were predicted in 1909, “Socialism is coming.”18
Debs decided not to run for the presidency in 1916; instead, he tried—unsuccessfully—for a congressional seat in his home state of Indiana.
Undeniably, the period from the end of Reconstruction to the New Deal stands as one of the nation’s most turbulent eras. As historian Alan Dawley has remarked, “Everything was in flux.” As the unstable 1890s illustrated, all was not well in this unsettled era, not only with the economy but also, and especially, for rank-and-file wage earners. The economic tumult of 1893 and a series of events, such as the rise of Populism, the Pullman Strike, and Coxey’s Army, all appeared as a reaction to this state of uncertainty and changing world. In the American heartland and elsewhere, the Panic of 1893 helped spur another protest movement—the rise of the People’s (or Populist) Party. Born out of the Grange movement and Farmer’s Alliances of earlier decades, by the 1890s, farmers felt at the mercy of grain elevator costs and the railroads, among other things. Agrarian protest typified the reaction to eastern financiers’ corporate control. The Populists outlined their goals at the famed Omaha Convention and stressed limiting monopolistic privilege and expanding direct democracy, for example, calling for the direct election of U.S. Senators and the right of Americans for initiative and referendum. Populists seemed to speak for the nation’s farmers and rural areas, where even by 1910 a farmer’s annual income was approximately $652. They also offered solutions to a sluggish economy, specifically bimetallism as a path to fiduciary reform, the Populist call for “free silver” and the coinage of silver (at a 16:1 ratio to gold) to stimulate currency and spending. They nominated, along with the Democrats (the famous political “fusion” moment), William Jennings Bryan for President. The young Nebraskan squared off against William McKinley in the 1896 election, a contest Clarence Darrow called “the greatest battle of modern times.”19
The labor climate grew so volatile that a number of other eruptions occurred throughout the period. The 1894 Pullman Strike sent a young Debs to jail and demonstrated the power of the federal government to quell labor action. In 1884, Debs had won a seat, as a Democrat, in the Indiana State Assembly. He later served as a leader in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, which raised his profile on the national labor organizing scene, where he eventually helped found and then led the American Railway Union (ARU). In the Illinois company town for workers crafting his luxurious railcars, George Pullman simultaneously raised rents and lowered wages. Debs and the ARU got involved and the resulting strike initially stopped trains in 27 states. It also increased ARU’s role and propelled him to national prominence. President Cleveland’s famous mail injunction reaffirmed the necessity of the U.S. mail moving unencumbered on American trains, and proved a powerful tactic that could get the trains moving again. “If it takes the entire army and navy of the United States to deliver a post card in Chicago,” he declared, “that card will be delivered.” He was right; the injunction, cited by railroad companies, meant the end of the strike. For Debs, the strike meant prison time. While incarcerated, though, he read widely and found himself increasingly radicalized, ultimately emerging from jail a committed socialist and a perennial SPA candidate; he ran as their nominee for President five times (once while incarcerated).20
Around the time of Pullman, labor versus capital had come to the American West, too. If there was one city that offered a window into these tensions, it was San Francisco, a city that would witness its own event of radicalism and violence in coming years. San Francisco, since the mid-nineteenth century, had functioned as the center of a large economic network that extended in all directions. A timber terminus and city with a huge demand for lumber as it transitioned from a temporary to permanent city, according to historian William Robbins, San Francisco “was an entrepreneur’s dream.” For those involved in the logistical matters and for those hoping to strike it rich looking for gold, money could be made in the town as well. The city had also served as a mining supply center for the Intermountain West or as a sales point for thousands of barrels of wheat grown along the Columbia River Valley.21
This economic growth and expansion, of course, necessitated a workforce, and the labor climate in San Francisco had long been one that favored workers. While obviously not the choice of business interests, a number of factors (notably geography, specific and limiting industry, and job availability) allowed the working class to take an active hand in asserting its power in the city. Unions dominated in common industries such as shipping and construction. The notion of the “closed shop,” the system where businesses pledged to hire only union workers, reigned in most of the San Francisco job market, as the city’s business owners, albeit reluctantly, accepted this arrangement. San Francisco’s union presence, according to historian Richard White, “created an even playing field” there and “businessmen were too bitterly divided among themselves to make common cause against the unions.” Even the city’s iconic streetcars had seen labor unrest. In 1906, railroad car men working for United Railroads of San Francisco went on strike, forcing the intervention of the national Association of Street Railway Employees. Striking workers ended their efforts only when the railway owners agreed to favorable arbitration.22
As the twentieth century moved ahead, San Francisco enjoyed a renaissance of sorts. It was a far cry from the devastation of the famous earthquake a decade earlier, which shook the city in the early hours of April 18, 1906, destroying 28,000 buildings and claiming the lives of around 700 people. Fires raged for three days, but San Francisco proved a resilient city. A newspaper in New York received this report from the city: “She’s crippled, thirsty, hungry, and broke; she has a few whole churches, only half her schoolhouses; not one French restaurant, not a theatre; she is full of people without homes, jobs, or clothes; she is [the] worst bungled-up town that ever was. But the spirit of her is something to bring tears to an American’s eyes.”23
While this post-earthquake revival all appeared optimistic and perhaps a bit idyllic, a radical undercurrent festered in San Francisco. In many ways, San Francisco in the early twentieth century had not strayed far from its Gold Rush roots. Political corruption, “the skullduggery of mining camp life,” and a “carousing culture” still persisted in what became known as “The Paris of the West.” Yet, labor leaders long thought of corporations like United Railroads of San Francisco as “the cruelest beast in the jungle of unorganized labor,” and a fight against it seemed to typify the struggle between capital and labor in the West. The company even succeeded in breaking up the carmen’s union in 1907. The unions lost the strike. Despite eight attempts at reorganizing over the next nine years, they were unable to. The skeptical among the labor community remained convinced that the company’s president Patrick Calhoun purposefully began the 1907 strike to cause distraction from ongoing investigations, yet the strike became much more than he and the company planned for. United Railroads also found help in Charles Fickert, described as a “big, hulking fellow with the face of a prize fighter.” It was no wonder he cut an imposing figure: he graduated from Stanford University, where he also served as captain of the football team. Fickert proceeded to work his way up the legal ladder. In 1904, he received a special appointment as a special assistant U.S. District Attorney for the Northern District in California. United Railroads reportedly spent $100,000 on his campaign for District Attorney. Neither wanted nor able, labor leaders sneered that Fickert was “simply a messenger boy to run an errand.” As D.A., Fickert stood poised to articulate the goals of the city’s business interests and work against organized labor.24
The company’s past, according to labor, was marked with “plunder and blood,” even purposefully dynamiting the home of witness James “Big Jim” Gallagher to gain support and prevent testimony against them.
When a Pennsylvania criminal court sentenced Alexander Berkman on September 19, 1892, he looked “as cool as anyone present” and matter-of-factly pled “not guilty” to the six charges of felonious assault and battery. At the sentencing, he took the opportunity to explain his motives and indict capital: “I know an example will be made of me for my act. The injustice of the ruling class is to blame for this,” he said. In a clear reference to Haymarket, he recalled, “I belong to those who were murdered at Chicago.” There was little defense to be made, and the state sentenced Berkman to 22 years in jail. He would serve just less than 14 years of the sentence in the penitentiary in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. He left prison ready to embark on more anarchist causes.25
The Frick/Berkman affair, Haymarket bombing, Pullman Strike, and more all showed just how the relationship between “the interests” and “the people” grew so strained during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This ever-unsettled relationship came as the wealth gap widened and war approached. Clearly, as the nation moved into the early twentieth century, it entered one of the most turbulent eras in its history, already a swirl of organizing, agitation, and, increasingly, violence. The later San Francisco events of 1916 were a clear part of this ongoing struggle. “For this war is essentially labor’s war,” one of the defense attorneys of the case in 1918 would say, “a conflict between two systems of civilization.”26
1 Gene Fellner, ed., Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 11–12; Pittsburgh Dispatch, July 24, 1892.
2 Pittsburgh Dispatch, July 24, 1892; New York Times, July 26, 1892.
3 New York Times, July 2, 1936; The Pittsburgh Dispatch, July 24, 1892; The Sun, January 6, 1918.
4 Paul Kahan, The Homestead Strike: Labor, Violence, and American Industry (New York: Routledge, 2014), 46, 94.
5 Pittsburgh Dispatch, July 24, 1892.
6 Miriam Brody and Bonnie Buettner, eds., Prison Blossoms: Anarchist Voices from the American Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), xxii–xxiv; Fellner, Life of an Anarchist, 5; Kahan, The Homestead Strike, 94.
7 Jeffrey A. Johnson, ed., Reforming America: A Thematic Encyclopedia and Document Collection of the Progressive Era, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2017), 199–200.
8 Norman Hopgood, “The Jews and American Democracy,” The Menorah Journal 2 (October 1916): 202; Randolph Bourne, “Transnational America,” The Atlantic (July 1916).
9 San Francisco Call, September 8, 1901.
10 Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1; The Pittsburgh Dispatch, July 24, 1892.
11 Johnson, Reforming America, 202–203.
12 Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford, 2003), 15–16.
13 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (New York: The Modern Library, 1951), v–xxii; Cyrus Field Willard, “The Nationalist Club of Boston (A Chapter of History),” The Nationalist 1 (May 1889): 17; See Helena Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy (London: The Theosophical Publishing Company, 1889).
14 Jeffrey A. Johnson, “Why Is There No Socialism in the U.S.? – 100 Years Later,” in U.S. History in Global Perspective, ed. Cathy Gorn (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2013), 1–16.
15 Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 1; Kahan, The Homestead Strike, 38–39.
16 McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 32; Howard R. Lamar, “Western Federation of Miners,” in The New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 1196–1197; The Farmer-Labor Party and Nonpartisan League are also important to these intersections of labor and politics. See, for example, Michael Lansing, Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
17 W. Bourke Cockran, A Heinous Plot: An Expose of the Frame-Up System in the San Francisco Bomb Cases Against Billings, Mooney, Mrs. Mooney, Weinberg and Nolan (Chicago, IL: Chicago Federation of Labor, 1917).
18 Commonwealth (Everett, WA), 19 July 1912; Appeal to Reason (Girard, KS), February 6, 1909; Johnson, “Why Is There No Socialism?”, 1–16.
19 Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1; McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 24.
20 www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presidents/grovercleveland24; Johnson, “Why Is There No Socialism,” 1–16.
21 William G. Robbins, Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon, 1850–1986 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 12; Donald W. Meinig, The Great Colombia Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805–1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 218, 226.
22 Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 290, 380–381; San Francisco Call, September 5, 1906.
23 “San Francisco,” in The New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 1009; Seth Dennis Cashman, America in the Age of the Titans: The Progressive Era and World War I (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 72.
24 Josh Sides, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 18; San Francisco Call, March 8, 1904; Minor, “Frame-Up System,” 4.
25 New York Times, September 20, 1892.
26 “The Mooney Case,” An Address by Hon. W. Bourke Cockran, July 28, 1918. MICH, 13.