United States History

E

Multicultural West

Races and ethnicities mingled in the late-19th-century West. Immigrants from Scandinavia and ethnic Germans from Russia settled farms in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Irish, Cornish, and Slovak miners moved to the mountain states. Other Europeans went west as speculators, adventurers, and prospectors, and some remained as residents. Chinese immigrants, over 90 percent men, arrived in California in the 1850s. They formed communities in Western cities, labored on the transcontinental railroad, and moved eastward with the railroad and mining booms. Japanese immigrants reached California in the 1890s and settled mainly in rural areas in the Pacific Northwest. Among African Americans who migrated to the West, a small number worked as cowboys; some founded all-black communities such as Langston, Oklahoma, and Nicodemus, Kansas. When the United States acquired Texas, New Mexico, and California at the end of the Mexican War in 1848, it incorporated many Mexicans who lived in what had been the northern border area of Mexico. Clusters of Native Americans lived everywhere.

The mixture of peoples in the West spurred competition and antagonism more than harmony. Virulent anti-Chinese sentiment in California pitted native-born workers against immigrants. The growth of the cattle industry affected land ownership in the southwest, to the detriment of Mexican Americans. The United States had promised Mexico to protect the freedom and property of Mexicans who remained in the area ceded to the United States, but American ranchers and other settlers took control of territorial governments and forced Hispanic settlers off their land.

Antipathy and violence, moreover, pervaded much of Western life. Hostilities flared not only between settlers and Native Americans, but also between ranchers and farmers, sheepherders and cattle ranchers, Mormons and non-Mormons (in Utah), and labor and management. Yet despite all these tensions, Americans and new immigrants poured into the West.

By the 1890s, the western half of the continent was linked firmly to the nation’s industrial economy. Huge meat-packing plants in Chicago and big corporations determined the profits of ranchers. Indebted farmers on the plains, who felt oppressed by railroads and dependent on distant markets, voiced their grievances through farmers’ alliances. Mining became a big business. Finally, cities arose from mining towns, from cattle depots, and as “gateways” on the borders of the plains. West or east, the nation was becoming more urban and industrial.

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XV

Industrialization and Urbanization

From 1870 to 1900 the United States became the world’s foremost industrial nation. It emerged as the leader in meatpacking, in production of timber and steel, and in the mining of coal, iron, gold, and silver. Overall, the nation experienced a stunning explosion in the scale of industry and in the pace of production. By the turn of the century, industrialization had transformed commerce, business organization, the environment, the workplace, the home, and everyday life.

Many factors fueled industrial growth in the late 19th century: abundant resources, new technology, cheap energy, fast transport, and the availability of capital and labor. Mines, forests, and livestock in the west provided raw materials for major industries, as did iron in Ohio and oil in Pennsylvania. Railroad expansion enabled businesses to move raw materials to factories and to send products to urban markets. A steady stream of immigrants arrived to work in America’s mines and factories.

Technological advances transformed production. The new machine-tool industry, which turned out drilling, cutting, and milling machines, sped up manufacturing. A trail of inventions, including the telephone, typewriter, linotype, phonograph, electric light, cash register, air brake, refrigerator car, and automobile, led to new industries. Finally, business leaders learned how to operate and coordinate many different economic activities across broad geographic areas. Businesses were thus able to become larger, and the modern corporation became an important form of business organization. For more information, see Industrial Revolution: The Industrial Revolution in the United States.

A

Corporations and Consolidation

In the 19th century, states reduced the requirements for businesses to incorporate. A corporation is a form of business partnership; it is a legal entity that is distinct from the individuals who control it. The corporation (not the individual partners) is responsible for repaying the corporation’s debts; this is known as limited liability. The corporate form of business organization made it possible for entrepreneurs to finance large-scale enterprises because corporations issue stock, certificates representing shares of ownership in a corporation. By issuing stock, a corporation can enable thousands of individuals to pool financial resources and invest in a new venture.

Businesses also grew by combining into trusts. In a trust, a small group of business people, called trustees, acquire enough shares in several competing firms to control those companies. The trustees are then able to manage and direct a group of companies in a unified way—in effect, creating a single firm out of competing firms. The trustees could prevent competition among the firms that were part of the trust. A leading example was the Standard Oil Trust, formed in Ohio in 1882 by John D. Rockefeller and his associates. Within a decade, trusts dominated many industries.

States tried to regulate trusts, but big businesses eluded state control. Afraid that trusts would destroy competition, Congress in 1890 passed the Sherman Antitrust Act. The act banned businesses from joining together in ways that controlled markets, as trusts had been doing. It also outlawed monopoly, in which only a single seller or producer supplies a commodity or a service. But the law defined neither trust nor monopoly and was poorly enforced. The courts threw out cases against the trusts and used the law mainly to declare unions illegal combinations in restraint of trade. For instance, the courts declared that unions that organized boycotts or strikes impeded the flow of commerce and thus violated federal law. Standard Oil, however, continued without interference. In 1892, to avoid Ohio laws, Standard Oil incorporated in New Jersey as a holding company, a corporation with only one purpose: to buy out the stock of other companies.

Corporations introduced new styles of management, or business organization. The railroads, which needed to manage crews, fuel, repairs, and train schedules over large areas, were the first to develop new management techniques. The railroads also developed standard time, which the United States adopted in 1883. Steel industry tycoon Andrew Carnegie, who continually sought less costly ways to make steel, also introduced new management techniques. The Carnegie Steel Company used precise accounting systems to track the costs of all processes and materials involved in making steel. To do this work, Carnegie hired middle managers and encouraged them to compete with one another.

New business practices led to larger corporations. Andrew Carnegie practiced vertical integration; he bought companies that sold supplies to the steel industry, including coal and iron mines and a railroad line. Carnegie thereby controlled every stage of the productive process from raw materials to marketing. Finally, he engaged in horizontal consolidation by acquiring his competitors. He priced his products so low that competitors could not compete and make a profit. Then he bought them out. By 1899 Carnegie’s company was the world’s biggest industrial corporation and produced one-fourth of the nation’s steel. However, vertical integration and horizontal consolidation helped concentrate power in a few giant corporations and limited competition.

According to business magnates such as Rockefeller and Carnegie, their huge enterprises provided new products at lower costs and enriched the nation, as well as themselves. Stressing the value of competition, captains of industry argued that it ensured the survival of the most competent. Business leaders also endorsed a policy of laissez-faire. Government, they believed, should leave business alone. In fact, the federal government adopted policies to benefit big business. Congress passed high tariffs (taxes on imported products) that impeded foreign competition; federal subsidies to railroads enriched investors; and courts penalized labor more often than business.

B

Labor

The trend toward large-scale production changed the structure of the labor force and the nature of work. From 1870 to 1900, as the industrial work force expanded, the unskilled worker replaced the artisan or autonomous craftsperson. The typical workplace was more likely to be a large factory than a small workshop. Striving for efficiency, employers replaced skilled labor with machines and low-paid workers. Factory tasks became specialized, repetitive, and monotonous. The need for unskilled labor drew women and children into the industrial work force. Some performed piecework, work paid for according to the amount produced rather than the hours worked, in crowded tenements; others operated machinery in textile mills and garment plants. Industrial labor in the late 19th century was often hazardous. Workers lacked protection against industrial accidents, long hours, wage cuts, layoffs, and sudden bouts of unemployment.

As the industrial work force grew, tensions increased between labor and management. They disagreed over issues such as wages, length of the working day, and working conditions. Labor unions emerged to protect the rights of workers and to represent them in negotiations with management. Most employers vigorously opposed trade union activity, and struggles between workers and employers often became violent.

The first national labor organization, the Knights of Labor, organized in 1869, tried to include all workers. The Knights reached their greatest strength between 1884 and 1885, when railroad strikes raged, and then declined. As the Knights of Labor faded, a new federation of local and craft unions, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), was organized in 1886. Led from 1886 to 1924 by Samuel Gompers, an immigrant cigar maker from England, the AFL welcomed skilled workers, almost all of them men. The AFL focused on hours, wages, working conditions, and union recognition by management. It also favored use of economic weapons such as strikes and boycotts.

Late-19th-century unions attracted only a small portion, perhaps 5 percent, of the work force, but strikes involved far more workers. In the last quarter of the century, thousands of strikes aroused public concern, and several large, violent events evoked fear. The great railroad strike of 1877 was a wildcat strike (a strike by a union local without consent of the national union to which it belongs) set off by wage cuts on a single railroad line. It became a nationwide protest that almost ended rail traffic and led to scores of deaths. Only the arrival of federal troops ended the strike.

In the 1880s, a decade of 10,000 strikes and lockouts, workers often succeeded in averting wage reductions and winning shorter hours. Most strikes concerned local grievances but some closed down entire industries and incurred reprisals. The Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago in 1886 grew out of a strike against a company that built agricultural machinery. Union leaders called a protest meeting at which police intervened and a bomb exploded, causing many deaths. Eight people were convicted of murder, and four were hanged. Repelled by the violence, the public blamed the labor movement for the casualties at Haymarket Square, and the Knights of Labor lost influence.

At the end of the 19th century, business often defeated workers’ demands. In the 1890s, at employers’ requests, federal troops crushed strikes at Idaho silver mines, Carnegie’s steel plants, and Pullman railway works. The Pullman strike began when workers for the Pullman Palace Car Company protested wage cuts. The protest led thousands of workers to join the American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs. But employers, who united to break the union, called for an injunction, a court order for workers to return to work, and attained it under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Federal troops arrived to enforce the injunction against the union, riots ensued, the strike was crushed, and Debs was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. The injunction was a powerful tool for business to use against labor.

Besides the injunction, union organizers faced other obstacles, such as blacklists (lists of union activists circulated among employers) and attacks by Pinkerton detectives (agents of a private detective firm that guarded factories, protected railroads, and battled labor). In some instances, employers forced workers to sign “yellow dog contracts,” in which they promised not to join unions. Management retained the upper hand.

C

Immigration

Industrial workers of the late 19th century were often foreign-born. From 1865 to 1885, immigrants arrived mainly from northern and western Europe, as they had before the Civil War; the largest groups came from England, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia. From the mid-1880s until World War I began in 1914, the number of newcomers from southern, eastern, and central Europe increased. Many new immigrants were Slavs—Poles, Czechs, Russians, Ukrainians, Croatians—and others, including Jews, from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. Among the new immigrants were also Greeks, Romanians, and Italians, mainly from southern Italy or Sicily. Record numbers of immigrants arrived in the United States, some 9 million from 1880 to 1900, and 13 million from 1900 to 1914. For more information, see United States (People): Growth through Immigration and Immigration: From 1840 to 1900.

Late-19th-century immigrants left their European homes to escape economic problems—scarce land, growing populations, and the decline of subsistence farming. They came to the United States in hope of economic gain. Most settled in the United States permanently, but others came only to amass some capital and then return home. Immigration dropped off during depressions, as in the 1870s and 1890s, and again during World War I, with smaller downturns in between. Immigration was encouraged by new technology such as steamships, which reduced the time needed to cross the Atlantic from three months to two weeks or less.

Where immigrants settled depended on their ethnicity and on when they arrived. In the post-Civil War decade, for instance, Scandinavian immigrants used the Homestead Act to start Midwestern farms. Two decades later, immigrants usually moved to industrial towns and cities, where they became unskilled laborers in steel mills, meatpacking plants, and the garment trade. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the population increased tenfold from 1850 to 1890, large numbers of Poles and Eastern Europeans found work in rolling mills and blast furnaces. By 1910 immigrants and their families constituted over half the total population of 18 major cities; in Chicago, eight out of ten residents were immigrants or children of immigrants.

Immigrants’ lives changed dramatically after they arrived. Uprooted, usually from rural areas in Europe, immigrants had to adjust to industrial labor, unfamiliar languages, and city life. Clinging to their national identities and religions, immigrants prepared ethnic foods, read foreign-language newspapers, and celebrated ethnic holidays. At the same time, they patronized urban amusements, found community support in local political machines, and adapted to the new environment. Men outnumbered women in new immigrant communities because men often preceded their wives and families.

Immigrants’ huge numbers, high concentrations in cities, and non-Protestant faiths evoked nativist or anti-immigrant sentiments. To native-born Americans, the newcomers often seemed more alien and more transient, less skilled and less literate than earlier groups of immigrants. Some strains of nativism rested on belief in the superiority of Anglo-Americans or Nordic peoples over all others. Other types of nativism reflected economic self-interest: Native-born workers feared competition for jobs from new immigrants; they feared also that immigrants would work for lower wages, which might mean less pay or even unemployment for them.

Both types of nativism arose on the West Coast, where immigration from China had been heavy since the 1850s. Responding to anti-Chinese sentiment, especially among California workers, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The law curbed Chinese immigration for ten years, a period that was subsequently extended indefinitely. A small number of immigrants from China continued to arrive, but the number of Chinese entrants slowed to a trickle. In the 1890s, meanwhile, Congress tightened immigration laws to exclude polygamists, contract laborers, and people with diseases. Nativist groups such as the American Protective Association (1887) urged immigration restriction.

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