Labor in the Gilded Age

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Describe the working conditions inside late-century American factories, mills, and railroads, including hours, wages, accident rates, and the expansion of child labor that accompanied industrial growth.
• Compare the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor as rival models of industrial unionism, accounting for membership rules, programs, leadership, and the consequences of each model.
• Account for the causes, conduct, and outcomes of the four flagship Gilded Age strikes (the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, Haymarket in 1886, Homestead in 1892, and Pullman in 1894), and explain why each strike pulled federal authority further toward the side of capital.
• Use Skill 6.C to construct an argument from the relationships among the lesson primary sources about whether organized labor in the Gilded Age was a defeated movement, a partial success, or both.
• Account for the continuities and shifts in American labor between 1865 and 1898 (Reasoning 3), including the persistence of low wages and dangerous conditions and the shift from broad-membership to craft unionism after Haymarket.

The story of Gilded Age labor is the story of the human cost that industrial capitalism extracted from the people who actually ran its machines. As prices for many manufactured goods fell after 1870 and the real wages of skilled workers rose modestly, many Americans saw improved standards of living, even as the gap between rich and poor grew wider than at any point in the nineteenth century (KC-6.1.I.C). The picture changed sharply for the workers underneath those headline numbers. Steelworkers in the Pittsburgh mills worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, and rotated between day shift and night shift through a single twenty-four-hour swing every two weeks. Garment workers in New York lofts paid for their own thread and sewing-machine rent out of piece-rate wages that fell during every depression. Railroad brakemen lost fingers, hands, or lives to handheld link-and-pin couplers at a rate that dwarfed every other industrial occupation, and the Interstate Commerce Commission would not require automatic couplers until 1893. The industrial workforce grew, and child labor expanded along with it (KC-6.1.II.B.i): children as young as eight worked as breaker boys in Pennsylvania anthracite mines and as doffers in southern textile mills, and roughly one in six children between ten and fifteen was a wage earner in 1900. The wage settlement that the new factory order produced was, on the whole, less safe, less stable, and less free than the artisanal and farm work it replaced.

Workers responded by organizing. Labor and management clashed over wages and working conditions, with workers organizing local and national unions or directly confronting business leaders (KC-6.1.II.C). Two rival national federations took shape in the 1880s and divided the labor movement for the rest of the century. The first was the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 in Philadelphia as a secret society of garment cutters and reorganized into a public organization in 1881 under Terence V. Powderly, a Pennsylvania-born machinist. The Knights opened their rolls to skilled and unskilled workers, to women, to African Americans, and to recent immigrants, and they rejected the trade-union assumption that craft membership was the basis for organization. They preached a sweeping program: the eight-hour day, equal pay for women, the abolition of child labor, government ownership of railroads and telegraphs, the replacement of the wage system with cooperative ownership, and an end to convict labor. After a successful 1885 strike against Jay Gould's Wabash Railroad, membership ballooned from roughly 100,000 to roughly 700,000 inside a single year. The Knights were the first major broad-membership national labor organization in American history.

The second federation was the American Federation of Labor, founded in December 1886 under Samuel Gompers, a London-born cigar maker. The AFL took the opposite organizing strategy. It was a federation of skilled-trade unions only, accepting unskilled workers and most women only at the margins, and it pursued what Gompers called pure and simple unionism focused on bread-and-butter wage and hour gains rather than the cooperative or political program of the Knights. Where the Knights asked what was wrong with industrial capitalism, the AFL asked what could be wrung out of it for craft members through the strike, the boycott, and the trade agreement. The AFL accepted industrial capitalism rather than challenging it. By 1900, after the Knights had collapsed, the AFL counted roughly 500,000 members and had become the dominant national labor body for the next forty years.

Four flagship strikes carried the question of labor's place in industrial capitalism into the public square between 1877 and 1894. The first was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Martinsburg, and St. Louis erupted in July of that year after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad announced a third wage cut in twelve months. The strike was spontaneous rather than union-organized, and at its peak it stopped most rail traffic between Chicago and the Atlantic coast for nearly two weeks. President Rutherford B. Hayes deployed federal troops, the first peacetime use of the regular army against American workers. More than one hundred strikers and bystanders were killed across multiple cities, and the railroads got their wage cuts. The strike of 1877 set the basic federal pattern that the next three strikes would confirm: when industrial conflict spilled into interstate commerce, the United States Army or the federal courts would intervene on the side of capital.

The second was the Haymarket affair of May 1886. A wave of national strikes for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1886, drew an estimated 350,000 workers off the job in cities across the country. Three days later in Chicago, a labor rally at Haymarket Square called to protest police violence against McCormick Reaper strikers ended when an unidentified bomb thrower killed seven police officers. Eight anarchists were tried for the bombing on the theory that their published rhetoric had incited it; four were hanged, one died by suicide, and the remaining three were eventually pardoned in 1893 by Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, who concluded that the trial had been a frame. The Knights of Labor had no organizational connection to the bomb, but the press painted them with the same anarchist brush, and Powderly's cautious public response failed to repair the damage. Membership collapsed from roughly 700,000 in 1886 to roughly 100,000 in 1890. Haymarket is the moment at which the broad-membership model of the Knights gives way to the craft-only model of the AFL.

The third was the Homestead Strike of 1892. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, the strongest skilled-craft union in the country, struck the Carnegie Steel Homestead Works outside Pittsburgh after manager Henry Clay Frick announced wage cuts and a refusal to renew the union contract while Andrew Carnegie was vacationing in Scotland. Frick locked the workers out, hired three hundred Pinkerton agents, and floated them up the Monongahela River on barges to retake the plant by force. The Pinkertons were beaten back in a daylong battle on July 6 that killed at least nine people. Frick then secured Pennsylvania National Guard troops, broke the strike, and operated the mill with strikebreakers. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was destroyed inside Carnegie's mills, and the Pittsburgh steel industry would not be unionized again until the New Deal era of the 1930s. Homestead is the moment at which the country's strongest craft union learned that it could not stand against the country's most modern corporation.

The fourth was the Pullman Strike of 1894. George Pullman, the manufacturer of the sleeping cars that ran on every major American railroad, cut wages by roughly twenty-five percent during the 1893 depression while refusing to reduce the rents in his company town outside Chicago. Workers walked out, and Eugene V. Debs's American Railway Union, a new industrial union that organized all railroad workers regardless of craft, voted a sympathy boycott of every train carrying Pullman cars. The boycott shut down rail traffic west of Chicago. Attorney General Richard Olney, a former railroad attorney, secured a federal injunction against the strike under the Sherman Antitrust Act on the theory that the boycott was a conspiracy in restraint of interstate commerce, and President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to enforce the injunction over the objection of Illinois Governor Altgeld. Debs was jailed for violating the injunction, and the United States Supreme Court unanimously upheld his contempt conviction in In re Debs (1895), giving the federal courts a permanent constitutional weapon against the strike. Pullman is the moment at which the federal injunction became the principal legal device used to break American strikes for the next forty years.

A radical alternative survived the defeat of the broad-membership model. The Industrial Workers of the World, founded in Chicago in 1905 and known to its critics as the Wobblies, organized unskilled and immigrant workers in the lumber, mining, and migratory-harvest industries that the AFL had abandoned. The IWW envisioned one big union that would replace the wage system rather than negotiate inside it. Although the IWW falls just outside the bounds of Period 6, it sits on the curriculum as the period's organizational legacy: the unfinished part of the Knights of Labor program that craft unionism would not address. State and federal repression during and after the First World War would dismantle the IWW, but in the early twentieth century it kept the broad-membership tradition alive.

The political and legal context made all of this possible. Late-century courts read the common law of conspiracy, the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the Fourteenth Amendment as protections of contractual freedom that ran in favor of employers, not workers. In re Debs in 1895 turned the labor injunction into a routine instrument; Lochner v. New York in 1905 (just past the period boundary) struck down a New York maximum-hours law for bakers as an unconstitutional interference with the freedom of contract. Working-class political power was real but bounded: immigrant voters delivered urban majorities to political machines that returned services and graft, but they did not deliver federal labor legislation. The eight-hour day for federal employees in 1868, the abolition of the truck-store wage in some states, the federal Erdman Act of 1898 banning yellow-dog contracts on the railroads, and the slow spread of state factory-inspection statutes were the principal legislative gains of the period. Federal recognition of the right to organize would not come until the Wagner Act of 1935. The labor settlement of the Gilded Age was a settlement in capital's favor, and the Progressive Era and the New Deal would be the long political answer to it.

Five sources frame the lesson. Together they let students reconstruct the Gilded Age labor argument from the workers' founding documents, from the press coverage of the great strikes, and from the Supreme Court decision that locked the federal injunction into place.

1. (Continuity and Change) Compare the Knights of Labor preamble of 1878 with the AFL founding documents of 1886. Identify two continuities and two significant shifts between the two visions. Which set, the continuities or the shifts, did more to determine the trajectory of the American labor movement, and on what grounds?
2. (Causation) Trace the causal chain that runs from the Haymarket bombing on May 4, 1886, to the collapse of Knights of Labor membership by 1890. At which step in the chain do you think a different choice by Powderly, by the Chicago press, or by the trial judge would have produced a different outcome, and why?
3. (Comparison) Compare the federal response to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Homestead Strike of 1892, and the Pullman Strike of 1894. What pattern emerges, and what does the pattern reveal about the relationship between organized labor and the federal government during the Gilded Age?
4. (Continuity and Change) Industrial working conditions in 1898 in many ways resembled those of 1865: long hours, dangerous machinery, and falling real wages during depressions. Identify one specific way the situation of the industrial worker had nonetheless shifted by 1898, and explain why that shift mattered for the workers themselves.
5. (Sourcing) Account for how the perspective and the audience of the Knights of Labor preamble, the Haymarket press coverage, the Homestead photographs, the In re Debs opinion, and the AFL founding speeches each shape what the source can and cannot tell us about the question of organized labor's place inside American industrial capitalism.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.