AP US HISTORYJanuary 16-19-2018 (short week)

Hope you worked on the Western Project will be January 19 Friday in class. You will not have many chances between now and the due date.

TUESDAY and WEDNESDAY Examine the origins of the organized labor movement in the 19th century (NAT-7) (WXT-5,6) Discuss some of the causes and effects of major strikes (sources on Wednesday)

Materials Strategy/FormatPpt and primary sources Lecture-discussion SL.CCR.1 and

L.CCR.2-3 R.CCR.1Student Skill TypesChronological Reasoning (1, 2)Comp/Context (5)Historical evidence (6,7) Interpretation/Synthesis (8, 9)

Introduction One of the most important events of the Gilded Age was the formation of major labor unions. The

industrial system that formed had reduced the quality of life for the working class to such a degree that sometimes violent strikes became the only alternative to a system that was highly oppressive and in some ways like the sharecropping system whereby one made so little wages that escape from the cycle of poverty was very difficult.

There had always been a rather negative view of labor unions as bastions of radicalism. Some of this stemmed from the fact that unions in Europe were equated with socialism and communism. In fact, some of the early labor groups were led by European immigrants. The labor union had also been equated to the same status under the law as monopolies, both being seen as restraints of trade. In 1890 the Sherman Anti-trust Act was written to define monopolies (trusts) and that included labor unions if they tried to strike.

Today we will look at the development of these unions and some of the major strikes of this period. Be sure and pay attention to similarities and differences.

There was a good reason why labor unions had difficulty forming in this era. Nearly everything was ranged against labor and management had all of the advantages.

a. Scabs: People who will cross the picket line and they usually are non-union b. Blacklists: a list of "known radicals" circulated among business ownersc. "yellow dog contracts": an agreement not to unionize as a condition of employmentd. Open Shops: States that allow people to refuse to join a union (as opposed to "closed shops"

d. Public Perception: Strikes smacked of communism or anarchism in the public eyee. Injunctions: Federal "cease and desist orders" making strikers stop protesting. f. A willingness to use force: This sort of speaks for itself. But to be clear National Guard troops and Federal troops were often called outg. Strike Breakers: These were professional thugs hired to attack strikers.

So what did the workers have at their disposal? Only the strike was a powerful weapon but it was hesitantly used. To lose a strike is to lose the union itself in many cases.

The Early Unions Early attempts by workers to organize for their own demands went all the way back to the early 19th

century. IN fact, women at the Lowell and Waltham mills in the early antebellum years launched a work stoppage in demands for better conditions.

Most often the major demand of organized labor involved better conditions more often than wage increases. The most common demand was for an 8 hour work day which we saw with the Populist Movement.

The earliest true union was called the National Labor Union. Founded in 1866 and dissolved in 1873, it paved the way for other organizations, such as the Knight of Labor and the AF of L American Fed. of Labor It was led by William Sylvis. The National Labor Union followed the unsuccessful efforts of labor activists to form a national coalition of local trade unions. The National Labor Union sought instead to bring together all of the national labor organizations in existence, as well as the "eight-hour leagues" established to press for the 8 hour work day, to create a national federation that could press for labor reforms and help found national unions. The National Labor Union was a utopian example of Sylvis’ desire to unite all workers. The union failed largely due to its attempted to form a political party and ultimately the formation of the more powerful Knights of Labor. Also, William Sylvis passed away and no real leadership replaced him.

The Knights of Labor Beginning while the NLU still had some membership, Uriah Stephens formed the Knights of Labor.

Following his death Terrence Powderly took over the union and expanded it to national prominence. The 1869, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was established in Philadelphia. The

organization believed that its predecessors had failed by limiting membership; the Knights proposed to organize both skilled and unskilled workers in the same union and opened their doors to blacks and women. The union reached out to all nationalities except the Chinese. At this juncture Asian immigration had accelerated and it was argued that they would weaken organized labor because they worked so cheaply.

In its early years, the organization was highly secret since in many areas union members were summarily fired. The Knights developed ornate rituals. But by the 1880s the Union started to become more political. You will recall that this was also the time when Populism was also forming. Another interesting aspect of the union was its membership preclusions. They sought to include within their ranks everyone but doctors, bankers, lawyers, liquor producers and gamblers. This expressed the economic and class arguments but also a growing moralistic viewpoint.1. An eight-hour work day (same as Populists)2. Termination of child labor 3. Termination of the convict contract labor system (the concern was not for the prisoners; the Knights of

Labor opposed competition from this cheap source of labor) 4. Establishment of cooperatives to replace the traditional wage system and help tame capitalism's

excesses Equal pay for equal work 5. Government ownership of telegraph facilities and the railroads (same as Populists) 6. A public land policy designed to aid settlers and not speculators 7. A graduated income tax (same as Populists)

The Knights in Decline Originally, the Knights of Labor opposed the use of strikes; however, new members and local leaders

gradually radicalized the organization. By the mid-1880s, labor stoppages had become an effective tool. The Knights won important strikes on the Union Pacific in 1884 and the Wabash Railroad in 1885. However, in 1886 a wildcat strike erupted (one that is unauthorized by union leadership) and the

Haymarket Square Riot of the same year. This was a sympathy demonstration in Chicago that turned bloody when someone threw a bomb at police killing several. The police then fired into the crowd. This event quickly eroded the Knights' influence—although no member was implicated in the latter event. In the public mind, the eight-hour work day and other demands by the Knights became equated with radicalism. To many, the terms "unionism" and "anarchism" were synonymous. Labor leader Terence Powderly organizing skills had brought the group's membership to more than 700,000 in the early 1880s, but by 1900 that number had dropped to approximately 100,000.

The Haymarket incident was certainly pivotal in that it transformed a skeptical public into vocal opponents of the group. Beyond that, however, the Knights suffered from mismanagement and internal divisions, especially the longstanding strife between the skilled and unskilled worker members. Finally, the rise of the American Federation of Labor offered an alternative that rejected radicalism and organized its members along craft lines

The American Federation of Labor In the same year as the Haymarket Incident the American Federation of Labor (A.F. of L.) (now simply

AFL) began that same year. The AFL was spearheaded by Samuel Gompers, a cigar maker by trade, who had learned of the economic struggles of the American laborer through conversations with cigar makers at the factory.

Gompers led AFL member unions and individual workers into struggles for shorter hours and higher wages. At first, blacks were openly encouraged to join the AFL, until it was later seen that their explicit stand on race issues hampered the union's expansion. Thereafter, as long as a union did not include anything in their constitution regarding the exclusion members because of race, those unions were welcome to join the AFL.

The strength of the union (it is still around today combined with the CIO) can be traced to two major factors. First, there was an emphasis upon collective bargaining. This demanded that the union first attempt negotiations with management. This was calculated to reduce the image of radicalism and it worked very well. Today the Federal Government Department of Labor usually oversees the process. This also created sympathy with workers as ownership often refused to treat with unions. By the turn of the century and Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, there will be a noticeable move toward acceptance of labor unions. A second factor involved Gomper’s stance on trade unions (skilled labor). He realized that skilled labor had more power to bargain. So, he organized the union into local unions (called locals) that answered to the Federated board. Thus, it resembled the government’s power structure. Wildcat strikes were forbidden (though they sometimes did occur later on).

ConclusionDespite the growth of unions, owners still had great power to control workers. It would be late in the 19th century before strikes were avoided by collective bargaining. But this did not mean that all workers were content. Radical movements continued to proliferate with both the socialist and communist parties gaining power. A labor union called the IWW (International Workers of the World) or "the Wobblies" led by "Big Bill Heyward were particularly radical and were not above resorting to acts of terrorism themselves.

Homework for Tuesday NightRead over the causes of the major strikes so that you’ll be able to understand. Most of this comes from the University of Houston digital history website. I included this link on our website and it is a great resourcehttp://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/ Major Strikes of the 19th centuryIntroductionWhile there were small scale labor strikes in the early 19th century the larger ones were during the Gilded Age. One reason for this was the series of economic downturns. In 1873 and again in 1893 there were two panics each one worse than the previous. Another issue was the money question taking on class distinctions. In nearly all cases the strikes involved wage cuts, the workday, and safety concerns. Additionally, in nearly all cases Federal, state, and local authorities used force to end the strikes and often, the unions were the big losers. In all cases, there was terrible violence and bloodshed.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the country's first major rail strike and witnessed the first general

strike in the nation's history. The strikes and the violence it spawned briefly paralyzed the country's commerce and led governors in ten states to mobilize 60,000 militia members to reopen rail traffic. The strike would be broken within a few weeks, but it helped set the stage for later violence in the 1880s and 1890s, including the Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago in 1886, the Homestead Steel Strike near Pittsburgh in 1892, and the Pullman Strike in 1894.

In 1877, northern railroads, still suffering from the Financial Panic of 1873, began cutting salaries and wages. The cutbacks prompted strikes and violence with lasting consequences. In May the Pennsylvania Railroad, the nation's largest railroad company, cut wages by 10 percent and then, in June, by another 10 percent. Other railroads followed suit. On July 13, the Baltimore & Ohio line cut the wages of all employees making more than a dollar a day by 10 percent. It also slashed the workweek to just two or three days. Forty disgruntled locomotive firemen walked off the job. By the end of the day, workers blockaded freight trains near Baltimore and in West Virginia, allowing only passenger traffic to get through.

Soon, violent strikes broke out in Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Governors in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia called out their state militias. In Baltimore, Charles A. Malloy, a 20-year-old volunteer in the Maryland National Guard, described the scene: "We met a mob, which blocked the streets. "They came armed with stones and as soon as we came within reach they began to throw at us." Fully armed and with bayonets fixed, the militia fired, killing 10, including a newsboy and a 16-year-old student. The shootings sparked a rampage. Protesters burned a passenger car, sent a locomotive crashing into a side full of freight cars, and cut fire hoses. At the height of the melee, 14,000 rioters took to the streets. Maryland's governor telegraphed President Rutherford Hayes and asked for troops to protect Baltimore.

It appears that some 40 people were killed in the violence in Pittsburgh. Across the country more than a hundred died, including eleven in Baltimore and a dozen in Reading, Pa. By the end of July, most strike activity was over. But labor strikes in the rail yards recurred from 1884 to 1886 and from 1888 to 1889 and again in 1894.

Native-born Americans tended to blame the labor violence on foreign agitators. "It was evident," said the Annals of the Great Strikes in the United States, published in 1877, "that there were agencies at work outside the workingmen's strike. Not surprisingly these tensions led some to call for immigration restrictions from central-eastern Europe, the origins of what will later be known as the “Red Scare.” The people engaged in these riots were not railroad strikers.

The Haymarket Incident On May 1, 1886, thousands of people in Chicago began demonstrations in behalf of an eight-hour workday.

The marchers' slogan was, "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will." On May 4, 1886, a deadly confrontation between police and protesters erupted at Chicago's Haymarket

Square. A labor strike was in progress at the McCormick farm equipment works, and police and Pinkerton security guards had shot several workers.

A public demonstration had been called to protest police violence. Eyewitnesses later described a "peaceful gathering of upwards of 1,000 people listening to speeches and singing songs when authorities began to move in and disperse the crowd." Suddenly a bomb exploded, followed by pandemonium and an exchange of gunfire. Eleven people were killed including seven police officers. More than a hundred were injured.

The Chicago Tribune railed against "the McCormick insurrectionists." Authorities hurriedly rounded up 31 suspects. Eventually, eight men, "all with foreign sounding names" as one newspaper put it, were indicted on charges of conspiracy and murder.

No evidence tied the accused to the explosion of the bomb. Several of the suspects had not attended the rally. But all were convicted and sentenced to death. Four were quickly hanged and a fifth committed suicide in his cell. Then, the Illinois Governor, Richard Ogelsby, who had privately expressed doubts "that any of the men were guilty of the crime," commuted the remaining men's death sentences to life in prison. Illinois's new governor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three surviving men. A German born immigrant who had enlisted in the Union army at the age of 15, Altgeld declared, "The deed to sentencing the Haymarket men was wrong, a miscarriage of justice. And the truth is that the great multitudes annually arrested are poor, the unfortunate, the young and the neglected. In short, our penal machinery seems to recruit its victims from among those who are fighting an unequal fight in the struggle for existence."

The Washington Post asked rhetorically: "What would one expect from a man like Altgeld, who is, of course, an alien himself?" The Chicago Tribune stated that the governor "does not reason like an American, does not feel like one, and consequently does not behave like one." In 1889, the American Federation of Labor delegate to the International Labor Congress in Paris proposed May 1 as international Labor Day. Workers were to march for an eight-hour day, democracy, the right of workers to organize, and to memorialize the eight "Martyrs of Chicago."

The Homestead Strike Originally built in 1880 and 1881 by local merchants, the Homestead Works was purchased by industrialist

Andrew Carnegie, who installed open-hearth furnaces and electricity in order to boost the plant's efficiency and reduce the need for skilled labor. Carnegie's steel mills produced armor for battleships, rails for western railroads, and beams, girders, and steel plates for bridges and skyscrapers.

Carnegie's drive for efficiency also led to an armed confrontation at Homestead. In contract talks in 1892, Henry Clay Frick, the superintendent of the Carnegie Steel Company, proposed to cut workers' wages, arguing that increased efficiency had inflated salaries. At the time, unskilled mill workers, who were mainly eastern European immigrants, made less than $1.70 for a 12-hour day. Skilled workers earned between $4 and $7.60 a day. Frick also wanted to eliminate the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union from the plant.

When the negotiations broke down, Frick shut down the mill, installed three-miles of wooden fence topped with barbed wire around the mill, and hired 300 guards supplied by the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The guards were placed aboard two company barges in Pittsburgh for the trip up the Monongahela River to nearby Homestead.

On July 6, the guards were confronted by hundreds of workers and townsfolk. In the gun battle that ensued, seven workers and three Pinkerton guards were killed. Twelve hours after the battle for Homestead began, the guards surrendered.

The union's apparent victory was short-lived. Within days, 8,500 members of the National Guard took control of the plant. When Frick was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in his Pittsburgh office, public opinion turned against the steel workers' union. By November, the union had been broken and the mill had reopened as a non-union plant using African American and eastern European workers. Union leaders were blacklisted from the steel industry for life.

One of the strike's consequences was that the steel mills shifted from an eight hour to a 12-hour a day, six-day work week, with a 24-hour shift (followed by a day off), every two weeks. It would be some 44 years before the steel industry would again be unionized.

The Pullman Strike 1894 was the second of four years of depression. The pinch was felt even by the Pullman Palace Car

Company, which manufactured the sleeping cars used by most of the nation's railroads. George Pullman responded by laying off several thousand of his 5,800 employees and cutting pay 25 to 50 percent, while refusing to reduce rents charged employees, who lived in the company town of Pullman, near Chicago. Then he fired three members of a workers' grievance committee.

On May 11, 1894, 90 percent of his workers went on strike. The strike spread nationwide when the American Railway Union refused to move trains with Pullman cars. Within a month, more than a quarter million other railroad employees had joined the strike.

The government, under President Grover Cleveland, swiftly won a court injunction ordering strikers back to work. When they refused to comply, he dispatched more than 14,000 federal troops and marshals. In Chicago, when soldiers fired into a crowd of 10,000, 25 persons were killed, 60 badly injured. Hundreds were jailed, including union leader Eugene Debs, who subsequently founded the Socialist party. Railroad attorney Clarence Darrow switched sides and defended Debs, launching his career as a defender of underdogs. Social Worker Jane Addams led an investigation of the strike.

Samuel Gompers and his fellow craft unionists at the helm of the American Federation of Labor spurned Debs' plea for a general strike to protest enlistment of the White House and the courts on the side of management.

Homework

Major Quiz tomorrow. This will NOT be document based and will have a great deal of vocabulary. Beware! I may throw in a few Multiple-Choice questions

THURSDAY (5th Period go to 1st Lunch) Quiz on the Labor Union movement major strikes of the 19th century(NAT-7) (WXT-5,6)

Materials StrategyQuiz forms on Labor-Strikes assessment W.CCR.1

Instructions This will be a rather long quiz without primary sources! However, there may be a few Multiple-Choice

questions

HomeworkWork on the Western Project (it is due tomorrow!!!!)

FRIDAY (text and notes optional) Review Activity History Period 5 antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction

Materials Strategy/FormatQuiz forms and notes (optional) assessment with partners

Instructions So, as I mentioned last week, we would have quite a few review activities and bell work this semester. The

AP Exam is Friday, May 11, 2018. With that in mind today we will be completing a practice test (alone or with a partner). This will involve both MC and SA questions from history period 5 so it’s like a flashback to big parts of midterm exam.

The Person (or partnership) with the highest score will get points on the next unit test (approximately) January 22nd (Monday)

Weekend HomeworkFollow the link below and read about the causes and effects of the 1893 Panic (you cannot copy the source but you are free to jot down a few notes to use on bell work quiz Monday Morning

https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/HIST312-10.1.2-Panic-of-1893.pdf