Chapter 3 steps back from the immediate industrial battlegrounds to explore the genesis of labor reform thought that became applied to the conflicts of the period. The subject confronts us with one of the classic sets of actors regularly identified with the Progressive Era: “middle-class” intellectuals. How did a generation of new social science professionals, in particular, respond to an era of class conflict, urban poverty, and mass immigration? In his monumental Atlantic Crossings, Daniel T. Rodgers makes the case for an Atlantic-wide world of reformers and public officials, eager to rebuild the city and modernize the countryside according to an international policy playbook. Supplementing Rodgers’s analysis with particular attention to labor issues, I compare and contrast the sources of what might be called “radical reform” ideas in the U.S. with those in Britain and Germany. I suggest that among the most positive and unique aspects of American development was the rise of the research university, best represented in the social science fields by the “engaged” scholarship of labor economist Richard T. Ely and his colleagues and students at the University of Wisconsin. For an extended moment, I argue, the Wisconsin Experiment acted out the pragmatic, cosmopolitan and “social democratic” promise of an American progressivism otherwise and all too soon given over to technocratic elitism.
In Chapter 4, I turn to legal and legislative chambers, where the labor movement and its middle-class allies as well as its antagonists worked out the institutional pathways of American industrial relations from the era of the Knights of Labor through the heyday of the American Federation of Labor. One question, I suggest, always bedeviled organized labor and its sympathizers: the question of legitimacy. Why, in short, could labor unionism not gain a surer foothold in American law and public life until the 1930s or, for that matter, even until today? Again, I suggest that a wider field of vision treating divergent development across societies resting on a common-law legal heritage (thus encompassing the UK, Canada, and especially the territories of Australia and New Zealand, or what the British, due to their global juxtaposition, call the Antipodes) offers new insight. Essentially, I suggest, the door of industrial jurisprudence in the English-speaking world was open, at least for some time, to a number of variations. For lesser-skilled, more easily replaced industrial workers—whose ranks in the U.S. were overwhelmingly composed of new immigrants—some support from the state proved essential to assure them a place at the bargaining table with their employers. Despite considerable internal debate and discussion, however, the dominant AFL-defined labor movement opted for a relatively anti-statist “British model.” when it might have been better served by the examples of Australia and New Zealand that combined state-sanctioned systems of union recognition with industrial arbitration of disputes.
Another form of Long Gilded Age internationalism is represented by the construction of the Socialist Party of America. As a political ideology drawing explicitly from European roots and as a social movement originally defined by its varied immigrant advocates, socialism carried both the promise and the peril of its inherently transnational presence. In Chapter 5 I try to recover the spirit behind the “golden age” of American socialism. Its very un-American-ness, I insinuate (contra much recent labor history scholarship), was part of the appeal of socialist doctrines to a young generation itching to taste the forbidden fruits of a wider world. Just as the post-adolescent American upper class ventured on its grand tour and new urban émigrés explored the thrills of Coney Island, so did other means of travel, both figurative and literal, summon those eager to break with Victorian norms. From social democracy to revolutionary syndicalism, anarchism to socialist feminism, and radical secularism to Christian socialism—the insurgent political tendencies of the age all beckoned in accents from across the globe. And a generation bred by this unspoken era of globalization—of study, travel, immigration, as well as international political solidarities—tried to take full advantage.
Finally, in a brief Epilogue, I make an effort to connect the Long Gilded Age to the American labor history that succeeded it. The Long Gilded Age’s subtitle speaks of the “lessons” of its time period. By that word, I mean to include at once the morals drawn, for good or ill, by Gilded Age contemporaries, and those that, looking back, we learn by considering events over a longer stretch of time. Where, in particular, do we see points of continuity, or perhaps even a second chance to come at old problems with new insights? To be sure, we live in a very different world from the one described in these essays. Yet, the urge to understand, and by understanding renew, continues. What, then besides world wars, devastating depressions, and a loss of confidence separate the promise of their times from our own?
Chapter 1
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The American Ideology
The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1864
Had Alexis de Tocqueville, miraculously, been able to revisit France and America a scant thirty years after his death in 1859, he might have been tempted to dramatically invert his principal judgments on the two nations. For Tocqueville, self-constituted civic organizations (associations in his vocabulary) figured centrally in distinguishing a buoyant democracy from the twinned specters of suffocating absolutism and excessive individualism. On the one hand, the ubiquity of such agents, commonly labeled the “spirit of volunteerism,” provided for Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835, 1840) the lodestone of America’s social promise. 1 On the other hand, as he argued in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), an all-powerful, centralized state—reflected in the LeChapelier Law of 1791 banning guilds and other intermediary bodies—snuffed out the lifeblood of liberal democracy in France. “For Tocqueville,” as historian Richard Swedberg summarizes, “the tragedy of the French Revolution was that it inspired freedom but that people had no idea how to go about creating a free society.” 2
And yet, by the late nineteenth century, the French state, while never abandoning its characteristic long reach, had moved markedly away from the suffocating control characteristic of both its absolutist and revolutionary heritage. By the time of the February 1848 Revolution, conservative republicans like Tocqueville were already beginning to positively reappraise worker associations as a possible brace against socialist statism. Over the ensuing decades, a combination of republican and labor/socialist reformers did, in fact, restore an associative dynamic to the body politic. Among the key departures affecting working people were the 1864 law abolishing the crime of “coalition,” the 1884 law legalizing trade unions and associations, an 1892 law facilitating conciliation and arbitration, and the Labor Code of 1910 that officially recognized a legal realm for collective bargaining and trade union action. 3
Still in place today, France’s institutional recognition of Tocqueville’s vaunted intermediary bodies has no parallel in American democracy. Except for business combination through the agency of incorporation, Americans in the industrial era found it more and more difficult under the prevailing laws to “join together” to advance their common economic interest. In particular this was the case for organized workers. Although union membership was generally recognized in principle after Massachusetts Judge Lemuel Shaw’s Commonwealth v. Hunt decision of 1842, in practice such bodies experienced multiple, often crippling, obstacles. By the late nineteenth century, the American national state