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    Chapter 5—The Rise of Urban-Industrial America

    Carlos A. Schwantes

    Life in the cities is fake and artificial. The intense passion for money getting, the whirl of excitement and pleasure seeking, the thirst for display, the luxury and extravagance, all are forces that, with the great masses of mankind, are turning the mind from life’s true purpose. They are opening the door to a thousand evils. Upon the youth they have almost irresistible power.WEGW 79.1

    One of the most subtle and dangerous temptations that assail the children and youth in the cities is the love of pleasure. Holidays are numerous; games and horse racing draw thousands, and the whirl of excitement and pleasure attracts them away from the sober duties of life. Money that should have been saved for better uses is frittered away for amusements.WEGW 79.2

    Through the working of trusts, and the results of labor unions and strikes, the conditions of life in the city are constantly becoming more and more difficult. Serious troubles are before us; and for many families removal from the cities will become a necessity. The Ministry of Healing, 364.WEGW 79.3

    Americans maintain an incredible number of historic shrines commemorating the nation’s important people, places, and events: George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation, the Gettysburg Battlefield, the site where the first transcontinental railroad was completed, even the National Baseball Hall of Fame. But where is the memorial to the triumph of urban America, the process that dramatically transformed a nation? Was the rapid urbanization phenomenon too complex, too encompassing, mind-boggling, or downright distressing to memorialize? Are the great cities monuments in themselves? Perhaps the triumph of urban America is best enshrined as statistics in federal census reports.WEGW 79.4

    The 1920 census recorded one of the great landmarks in American history: For the first time, more people lived in urban areas than in rural areas. The number of Americans living in centers with more than 2,500 inhabitants had grown from 19 percent in 1860 to 39 percent in 1900 and to 52 percent in 1920. A nation born in the country had moved to town, or so it seemed.WEGW 80.1

    Actually, rural America was growing too, but not nearly as fast as the urban centers. Most impressive was the increase of cities with populations of 100,000 or more. The number leaped from 9 in 1860 to 38 in 1900 and to 68 in 1920. The rate of growth was especially high in the newly settled West. Denver, for example, a frontier town of 4,700 in 1870, grew to more than 107,000 two decades later. During the decade of the 1880s, Seattle grew by more than 1,000 percent, and its rival on Puget Sound, Tacoma, by more than 3,000 percent. But statistics piled upon statistics cannot begin to convey the hopes and fears that the growing metropolises excited.WEGW 80.2

    A series of technological innovations, such as the telephone, electric streetcar, and skyscraper, enabled cities to reach upward and outward with dramatic grasps toward sky and horizon. Growth, however, was not a matter of technology alone, for cities also offered numerous cultural and economic allurements, ranging from the amenities of public libraries, symphonies, and lyceums to jobs and other forms of financial opportunity. Yet while admirers praised city life for its refinement and opportunity and regarded technological triumphs as confirmation of the nation’s inventive genius, critics found much to fault.WEGW 80.3

    Historians have labeled the last three decades of the nineteenth century in the United States the “Gilded Age” for good reason: a glittering facade that Americans called progress concealed a multitude of problems. Not without cause was a best-seller of the age called Progress and Poverty. Especially in the metropolises of the 1880s and 1890s, streets, water and sewage facilities, and housing and social services for the poor were abominable.WEGW 80.4

    Cities had simply grown too fast and with too little planning. In an age that granted private enterprise nearly unrestricted freedom, and lionized the conspicuously rich, the desire to make a profit shaped the urban environment. Parks and other green oases were called the lungs of the city because their trees and grasses supposedly purified and freshened stale air, but in many neighborhoods the most visible green was on the dollar bill. There were no profits in parks and greenbelts, not when land prices were measured by the square foot.WEGW 80.5

    Gently curving boulevards pleased the eye, but there was no money in aesthetics. Besides, rectangular shaped lots lent themselves best to private development for profit. Consequently, cities spread outward along a repetitive, monotonous grid-shaped pattern of streets that contributed to the visual ugliness of the typical American cityscape.WEGW 81.1

    City streets were not only ugly and unkempt but quite often paved with little more than promises. In Chicago, for example, two thirds of the streets remained unpaved as late as 1900. When it rained, streets became muddy quagmires and open sewers. Part of the problem was the nineteenth century’s dependence on horse-drawn transportation. If street surfaces were too smooth, horses had trouble getting traction. And the horse was a far worse polluter than is the automobile. On New York City streets alone, at the turn of the century, horses deposited an estimated 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine every day.WEGW 81.2

    Garbage in the streets, the daily addition of tons of manure, polluted water and air, swarms of flies and mosquitoes, all mocked the idea of public health. In 1900, Baltimore and New Orleans, for instance, scarcely had any underground sewers. In most cities, individuals maintained their own privies. A leading authority on public health observed that a single privy “may render life in a whole neighborhood almost unendurable in the summer.” Methods of purifying drinking water were equally primitive. The danger to health posed by dirty drinking water was not generally recognized until the 1890s. Only gradually did the germ theory of disease replace the notion that “sewer gas” or miasmic vapors caused illness and death. Cholera, malaria, typhoid fever, and smallpox regularly visited crowded urban neighborhoods. In the Memphis, Tennessee, area in 1878 a severe yellow fever epidemic killed nearly 5,000 people.WEGW 81.3

    Congestion compounded the problem of maintaining good public health. In the tenth ward of New York’s Lower East Side in 1880, 47,000 people crowded into 48 city blocks. Because of high land costs, private developers covered nearly every square inch of ground. In some of the tenement buildings, more than half the rooms lacked windows. In response to a reform law passed in 1879, New York developers perfected the “dumbbell” tenement, a five- or six-story structure with four apartments to a floor. A slight indention between buildings formed a shaft that was supposed to admit light and air to the inner apartments, but more than anything it was a source of bad odors and noise. The typical tenement building remained dark, cheerless, and disease ridden.WEGW 81.4

    The diversity of problems overwhelmed municipal governments in the late nineteenth century. Lord James Bryce, a British observer who visited the United States several times in the 1870s and 1880s, found that “the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States.” Prominent educator Edward D. White was more blunt when he wrote in 1900 that “with few exceptions, the city governments of the United States are the worst in Christendom—the most expensive, the most inefficient, and the most corrupt.”WEGW 82.1

    The fact was that urban governments were not originally designed to cope with a host of complex issues. Moreover, rural-dominated state legislatures, reflecting a prejudice against the metropolises, often denied cities the power to alter their governments to respond to new circumstances.WEGW 82.2

    In addition, because a majority of Americans in the late nineteenth century worshiped at the shrine of privatism, they believed in limited government that was at worst fragmented, feeble, and ineffective, and at best was not much better. As a result, a number of informal institutions and arrangements developed, such as the city machine, a political organization that provided the poor a variety of social services in exchange for their votes. Corrupt though they typically were, city machines functioned as primitive social welfare agencies.WEGW 82.3

    Aiding the poor was not the only reason for the existence of the city machine. This organization thrived on the rapid urban growth that multiplied opportunities for graft. Politicians and city employees were obligated to the machine bosses for their jobs. They were expected to remember their benefactors in a variety of ways, usually financial: policemen occasionally purchased promotions and dispensed favors for a price, politicians collected bribes from utility companies in exchange for awarding franchises. Favored contractors granted kickbacks to the city officials who hired them.WEGW 82.4

    Outraged taxpayers, bearing the cost of excessively expensive additions to city hall or some other project that enriched the machine politicians and their cohorts, demanded reform but usually accomplished little. When in the 1890s Chicago reformers tried to defeat a corrupt alderman in a slum district, they ran into opposition from important corporations, streetcar conductors, telephone operators, peddlers, and others who obtained jobs, licenses, and a variety of favors from the culprit. Change in the form of civil service examinations and other reforms would eventually come, but cleanup was usually a dishearteningly slow, two-steps-forward-one-step-back struggle.WEGW 83.1

    Despite its many perplexing problems, the city remained a magnet attracting new residents from Europe and the rural regions of America. The theme of farmers’ sons and daughters leaving the family homestead for the bright lights and other allurements of the city was well grounded in fact. In the age before radio, television, motion pictures, and automobiles erased many of the distinctions between rural and urban life, city attractions proved enticing to country folk. This was especially true of those living in isolated areas where educational and cultural facilities were limited and jobs off the farm were scarce.WEGW 83.2

    The city dominated rural and small-town America in other ways as well. During the two decades that followed the end of the Civil War in 1865, the spiking together of a nationwide network of railway lines greatly extended the economic power of the city. Increasingly, the items stocked by the village general store were manufactured and packaged in a distant city. With the rise of manufacturing giants that dominated the new nationwide markets, small-scale local industries found it impossible to compete.WEGW 83.3

    Farmers who raised cash crops discovered themselves at the mercy of commodity speculators and big city buyers. Often the low price they paid the farmer for his wheat, cotton, or corn bore no apparent relationship to his costs or hard toil. Perhaps most irritating of all, with the increasing importance of urban America the farmer lost status and prestige. In the eyes of many city people the sturdy yeoman of yesterday became the “hayseed” of today.WEGW 83.4

    Inevitably, tensions arose between city and country. For a good many rural folk the city was “enemy terrain,” a phrase used by the Democratic Party’s 1896 presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan. As spokesman for rural America, Bryan portrayed cities as parasites living off the country: “Burn down your cities and leave your farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic, but destroy our farms, and grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”WEGW 83.5

    The hostility expressed by Bryan and a good many other Americans was not merely a result of their fear or envy of the city’s growing economic power. City life itself appeared threatening to people who cherished traditional values and ways of doing things. A casual walk through the city was frequently sufficient to unnerve people not accustomed to the restless sea of strangers. The brownstone mansions contrasting with squalid tenements, street smells and factory smoke, the discordant sounds of whistles blowing, bells ringing, and vendors shouting, was too much.WEGW 84.1

    To folk whose lives followed the time-honored rhythms of nature—planting in the spring, harvesting in the fall; rising at dawn, retiring at dusk—the accelerated pace of city life was artificial. People there arranged activities according to the clock in increments of minutes and even seconds, a degree of preciseness irrelevant to life in the country. City people further divided their days into distinct blocks of work time and leisure time, and they spent their leisure in a variety of ways disturbing to rural Americans: in addition to public baseball and prizefights, many attended theaters, burlesque houses, pool halls, and saloons. Rural America had its vices, but none seemed as blatant as those of the metropolis.WEGW 84.2

    Saloons especially disturbed critics of the city. East of the Mississippi River in 1880 there was one saloon for every 438 persons; in cities the number of saloons increased noticeably. Saloons in many locales outnumbered churches. The saloon served as a poor man’s social club, but it was also a center of vice, often providing easy access to drugs, gambling, and sex, in addition to liquor. Many a saloon served as a link between crime and the city machine.WEGW 84.3

    For Protestants of a small-town or rural background the metropolis was unquestionably the devil’s playground. Increasingly, it was also home for new arrivals from the Old World, immigrants whose culture and behavior appeared strange to old-stock Americans and whose swelling numbers made the established group apprehensive. Three fourths of the population of turn-of-the-century Chicago was foreign-born. New York’s Italian population in 1890 was half that of Naples, and its Irish numbered twice that of Dublin. A person could walk for blocks through the immigrant neighborhoods without hearing a word of English.WEGW 84.4

    A growing percentage of the immigrants who congregated in America’s large cities after 1880 came from Southern and Eastern Europe. They were the “new” immigrants. In contrast to the “old” immigrants from Northern and Western Europe—mostly Protestants, except for the Irish and some Germans—the “new” immigrants tended to be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish.WEGW 85.1

    For a variety of reasons, the “new” immigrants assimilated only slowly into the larger American society. As strangers in a strange and occasionally hostile land, they clung tenaciously to the language and faith of their fathers and clustered in urban ghettos or enclaves. These offered them the protection of the familiar and encouraged them to maintain their ethnic identity. All of this posed a challenge to the traditional beliefs and practices of America’s Protestant majority.WEGW 85.2

    Some Protestants, such as Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of Brooklyn’s wealthy Plymouth Church and one of the most influential ministers in America, accommodated themselves to the city. The sentimental and egotistical Beecher won a large and loyal following by preaching a smug and complacent Christianity that bolstered the individualistic social and economic aspirations of the city’s middle and upper classes. Others, the Social Gospelers, reached out to the poor and disinherited by establishing city missions and insisting that Christians address themselves not only to heavenly rewards but also to the problems on earth.WEGW 85.3

    Some Protestants, however, never did come to grips with the metropolis. For them it was always an alien and hostile world hopelessly steeped in rum and Romanism. Theirs was the gospel of flight to the safe haven of the suburb and countryside.WEGW 85.4

    Expansion of electric streetcar and steam railway services to the outskirts of the city during the 1890s made possible the rise of numerous suburban communities. In large cities many wealthy residents and those who felt threatened by the urban environment fled to the suburbs, which offered the advantage of contact with nature while being close enough to the city to enjoy its economic and cultural benefits. In the early years of the twentieth century the Country Life movement enjoyed a brief vogue. The sponsors of this notion were romantics who believed the countryside to be the salvation of the nation.WEGW 85.5

    Ironically, just as new transportation technology made flight to the suburbs possible, a number of municipal reform movements arose to attack targets ranging from vice to impure milk. Aided by the muckrakers, who exposed the “shame” of the cities, municipal reformers grew even more noticeable and successful after the turn of the century. Some cities experimented with new forms of government—professional managers and commissioners took over many of the functions of mayors and aldermen—and instituted civil service in an effort to break the stranglehold of corrupt city machines. They also initiated or supported some rudimentary programs to provide social welfare for the needy. But for some these reforms made no difference: they had abandoned the city and its masses to pursue a safe, sanitized, and individualistic way of life in suburban, small-town, or rural America.WEGW 86.1

    The city that bewildered and frightened so many old-stock Americans was preeminently a manufacturing center, home to a large number of working-class families. Their dependence on factory jobs and wages seldom allowed them the option of escaping to the country.WEGW 86.2

    Despite the facts, however, one of the persistent themes in nineteenth-century American thought held that the nation’s unoccupied frontier lands served as a safety valve during periodic economic depression to relieve the discontent of urban-industrial workers. Where the city’s industrial workers were to acquire the money and knowledge necessary to take up farming was never adequately explained. In truth, just the opposite migration took place: the city functioned as a safety valve for rural unrest. During hard times thousands of agrarians came to the city seeking work but usually succeeded only in heightening the struggle for a limited number of jobs, depressing the wage rates, and thereby worsening urban unrest.WEGW 86.3

    Even during the best of times the lot of an industrial worker in the late nineteenth century was precarious. Although wages tended to increase from the late 1870s until the depression of the 1890s, workers were not handsomely rewarded. In 1893 the average annual income for all workers was about $450, and to earn that a person toiled 10 hours a day, six days a week. After paying for life’s bare necessities, little remained to buy a home or provide for emergencies such as sickness or injury. The disablement or death of the principal breadwinner was a family catastrophe, for no one had yet invented the social safety net later provided by workmen’s compensation, sickness and accident insurance, Social Security, and pension plans.WEGW 86.4

    Industrial labor was not only arduous but also dangerous. Exposed gears and pulleys regularly crushed hands and wrenched off arms. Heat, dust, and toxic fumes that built up in poorly ventilated factories sapped workers’ vitality and contributed to premature aging and death. Factory and mine inspection laws that might have prevented industrial accidents were either nonexistent or at best poorly enforced. In fact, until the turn of the century, few laws spoke to the specific needs of workers. Lawmakers, reflecting society at large, had difficulty comprehending a rapidly changing world.WEGW 87.1

    During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Americans witnessed a technological revolution as machines replaced skilled craftsmen and powerful new corporations employing hundreds and even thousands of unskilled workers turned out an ever expanding array of products. Sullen artisans, whose skills had once guaranteed their independence, ended up selling their labor for wages. People accustomed to the simple, face-to-face relationships of a preindustrial age resisted the system of working for wages. They objected to its impersonality and even regarded it as a form of slavery.WEGW 87.2

    So dramatic was the transformation of the American economic landscape that many people were overwhelmed by a sense of loss and fear. They searched in vain for old landmarks and familiar pathways to guide them safely through the strange new world of corporate monopolies and trusts, labor unions, and industrial violence.WEGW 87.3

    No problem caused more concern than the nation’s ever more obvious division into rich and poor. At the turn of the century, 80 percent of Americans lived at the margin of subsistence while the remaining 20 percent controlled almost the entire wealth of the country. Members of a small but conspicuous financial elite, who made more money in a single day than the average worker earned in a year, competed to outdo one another in flaunting their wealth. At a sumptuous dinner at Delmonico’s, cigarettes rolled in hundred-dollar bills were passed out after coffee. The wife of one millionaire spent $50,000 for a bathtub carved from a single block of rare pink Carrara marble. Another told reporters that the only thing economical about her private railway car was the solid gold plumbing: “It saves polishing, you know!” Finally, there was the tycoon who gave a dinner party for his dog and presented him with a diamond collar worth $15,000.WEGW 87.4

    The ostentatious wealth of the new millionaires dazzled and excited Americans, but when contrasted with the grinding poverty of the increasingly prominent class of wageworkers, it troubled those who idealized the United States as a republic of individualistic, common people. The lopsided distribution of wealth and the violence that punctuated the era’s labor-management relations caused many to fear that “the American people will not forever sit still in close quarters upon narrow rations, while a handful of men clutch the spoils that properly belong to the whole community as the product of their industry.”WEGW 88.1

    Some warned that the disturbing new economic order would expire in a cataclysmic finale “more horrible and far-reaching than the French Revolution.” The powerful new engine of wealth production seemed to lack an effective governor as it propelled the nation’s economy along an ever more dangerous course alternating between unprecedented peaks of prosperity and equally unprecedented valleys of depression.WEGW 88.2

    Americans plunged into severe economic depression in the mid-1880s. Thought leaders in an age that had as its byword “survival of the fittest” were resigned to the human misery that periodic slumps, panics, and crashes caused. They were often inclined to view depressions as natural phenomena similar to hailstorms and floods. Some even spoke in lofty tones of the salutary effects of hard times, of how they chastened real estate speculators, stockjobbers, and the improvident generally.WEGW 88.3

    But unemployed workers viewed such troubles from the considerably different perspective of the empty stomach. “Hard times,” said a nineteenth-century observer, “create empty stomachs and reflecting minds. People then commence to study and to sympathize with ideas which they regarded as ridiculous but a few years earlier.” Some plunged into radical politics; others lashed out in violent protests against wage cuts and mass layoffs. More than anything else, depressions reminded workers of the power employers held over them because of the wage system.WEGW 88.4

    In the struggle for survival, workers found sustenance in their lodges, clubs, and unions. These provided camaraderie and, frequently, vital death and disability benefits. Many also sponsored lyceums, study groups, brass bands, and picnics, all popular forms of activity in an age innocent of motion pictures, radio, and television.WEGW 89.1

    For a few years one of the most popular labor organizations was the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor. Functioning as a combination lodge, political reform club, and trade union, the Knights grew to international proportions in the 1880s, and was for a time the dominant labor body in the United States and Canada. Though not the first labor union in North America, the Knights attained greater influence than any predecessor.WEGW 89.2

    In keeping with their idealistic motto “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All,” Knights sought to unite “all branches of honorable toil without regard to nationality, sex, creed, or color.” Only a mixed bag of doctors, lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers, professional gamblers, and liquor sellers were excluded. Elaborate and secret rituals and mysteries created by people steeped in the rites of Masonry, the Odd Fellows, or the Knights of Pythias provided members a sense of dignity, a welcomed escape from loneliness, and protection from the prying eyes of employers.WEGW 89.3

    Knights opposed the wage system and ultimately hoped to perfect a viable alternative such as worker-owned and -operated cooperatives. They also promoted a host of less encompassing reforms such as abolition of child labor, equal pay for men and women doing the same work, and health and safety laws. In their struggle with recalcitrant employers they used both the boycott and the strike.WEGW 89.4

    Although Knights were committed to peaceful change through education and political and economic persuasion, they still aroused hostility in many quarters. Some people feared economic strangulation by boycott; others objected to labor organizations in general. Catholic church leaders disapproved of the Knights’ secrecy and of certain quasi-religious elements in their ritual, and though Knights eliminated the objectionable features in 1881, some Catholic leaders continued to condemn the order for several more years.WEGW 89.5

    Despite such opposition, the Knights prospered. After they abandoned secrecy, their membership doubled and quadrupled, reaching a high of 700,000 in early 1886. But rapid growth was but a prelude to an even more rapid decline.WEGW 90.1

    A protest staged in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in 1886 fatally tainted the Knights in the opinion of many people, although the order was not responsible for the violence that erupted there. Anarchist speakers had just finished addressing a large crowd of striking workers when police arrived to disperse the gathering. When someone threw a bomb, panic-stricken officers opened fire. In the melee, seven policemen and four workers were killed, and about 70 persons were wounded. The Haymarket riot caused an immediate revulsion against anarchism and other protest movements, the Knights included. Membership dropped precipitously, and the order never recovered.WEGW 90.2

    Rightly or wrongly, many Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated labor unions with violence. During that time the United States had the bloodiest labor-management relations of any industrialized nation. Major outbursts of violence erupted during the great railway strikes of 1877 (the nation’s first widespread work stoppage), the Haymarket riot of 1886, the Homestead strike of 1892, and the Pullman strike of 1894. During the 1890s, Rocky Mountain mining camps—particularly those in the Coeur d’Alene region of north Idaho—remained in an almost constant state of turmoil punctuated by dynamite blasts, beatings, and shootings.WEGW 90.3

    The problem was that labor and management confronted one another with no commonly accepted precedents or principles to guide their actions. Many employers could no more accept the legitimacy of organized labor than many workers could accept the permanency of the wage system. Inclined to regard any demand by labor as a dangerous challenge to management’s prerogatives, some employers preferred to confront their workers across the barricades rather than at the bargaining table. Employers occasionally precipitated trouble by firing union workers and replacing them with lower paid nonunion, or “scab,” labor, planting spies in union meetings, intimidating union sympathizers with thugs and hired gunmen, and using agent provocateurs to foment the violence that discredited organized labor in the eyes of the public.WEGW 90.4

    Americans who glorified individualism, abhorred the notion of social classes, and idealized their nation as a promised land of unprecedented economic opportunity found it impossible to comprehend the causes of worker protests and equally impossible to imagine that any good could come of the trade union movement. The very term organized labor sounded alien to many an ear. The fact that the new industrial era was also an age of organization often eluded people accustomed to a preindustrial world in which economic relationships were commonly conducted between individuals.WEGW 91.1

    In such a simple world, employee and employer possessed relatively equal power. The employer set wages, hours, and working standards, and the employee was free to accept or reject these. Perhaps by informal bargaining he could get the employer to modify his terms. If not, he could always take another job down the road. At least, that was the vision of preindustrial America that many held.WEGW 91.2

    But in the industrial era the employer was often a corporation. The corporation represented “individualism incorporated“: that is, in the eyes of the law a corporation was an artificial person entitled to the same constitutional privileges and immunities as a flesh-and-blood person. The same American glorification of individualism applied to both, although in reality the corporation possessed far more power than any actual person. An individual railway engineer, for example, was scarcely on an equal footing with his employer when that employer happened to be the Pennsylvania Railroad or some other large corporation. People who insisted that the old equality still applied in such a relationship could never understand that only by uniting with fellow workers could a lone employee hope to acquire bargaining power equal to that of his employer.WEGW 91.3

    A later age would describe the relationship between organized capital and organized labor as one of the countervailing power. But in the late nineteenth century people often referred to corporations as “trusts,” “monopolies,” “soulless machines,” or “octopuses” whose grasping tentacles reached everywhere; labor unions were referred to as “communistic” or “un-American.” Of the two forms of organization, labor usually seemed the greater threat. Thus when workers joined together to protest long hours, low wages, or dangerous working conditions, many observers called for repression: “Give the workingmen and strikers gun bullet food for a few days, and you will observe how they take to that sort of bread.” Time and again, state and federal troops were called out to help corporations resist the demands of organized workers. In most cases, middle- and upper-class Americans blamed labor and not organized capital for violating America’s time-honored principle (or myth) of individualism.WEGW 91.4

    Shaping such public opinion were a press and pulpit generally hostile to organized labor. Although a few Protestant clergymen sought to adapt their beliefs to the new age by promoting the social gospel and even Christian socialism, most Protestant spokesmen supported traditional economic individualism and were inclined to see the evolving social order as just. In fact, in no place did the new business elite find greater favor than in the Protestant churches. Baptist clergyman Russell Conwell in a celebrated lecture, “Acres of Diamonds,” preached a gospel that celebrated riches: “I say that you ought to get rich; you have no right to be poor.” He suggested that it was wrong to be poor.WEGW 92.1

    Defender of the economic status quo, Henry Ward Beecher maintained that the poor should be content to live on bread and water, arguing that a man “who cannot live on bread is not fit to live.” Protestants shared Beecher’s condemnation of the eight-hour day, viewed poverty as a sign of personal sin, and advocated suppression of strikes. Some, such as a Lutheran congregation in Wisconsin, even forbade members to join labor unions.WEGW 92.2

    The Roman Catholic Church’s response to industrialism was at first ambivalent. While some conservative bishops opposed the Knights of Labor, James Cardinal Gibbons—for more than 30 years the nominal head of the Catholic Church in America—thought the order posed no real danger to Catholics. He established himself as a supporter of the workingman. In 1891 Pope Leo XIII issued a famous encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which called the condition of the working class “the pressing question of the hour.” Though upholding private property and condemning violence, Leo maintained that the laboring poor suffered under “a yoke little better than that of slavery itself” and asserted it was the duty of the state to foster social justice. Largely as a result of the work of Cardinal Gibbons and the Rerum Novarum, the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed a reputation as a friend to labor, a reputation that Protestantism progressively lost. It need not have been that way.WEGW 92.3

    Many of America’s pioneer labor leaders were Protestants who based their call for economic and social reform on a New Testament vision of justice for the poor and a condemnation of riches. Some of the early labor anthems were adaptations of songs that workers sang in Protestant churches, such as “Hold the Fort” and “In the Sweet By and By“:WEGW 93.1

    “There’s a glorious future in storeWEGW 93.2

    When the toil-worn shall rise from the dust;WEGW 93.3

    Then the poor shall be trampled no more,WEGW 93.4

    And mankind to each other be just.WEGW 93.5

    “In the sweet by and by,WEGW 93.6

    When the spirit of justice shall reign;WEGW 93.7

    In the sweet by and by,WEGW 93.8

    When the spirit of justice shall reign.”WEGW 93.9

    But as the nineteenth century wound to a close it became ever more evident that Protestantism was losing its working-class members. The close alliance between Protestantism and wealth, and the attitude of Protestant clergymen toward labor’s struggle, had not gone unnoticed by workers. “We believe much in Jesus and in His teachings, but not much in the teaching of His pretended followers,” one workingman declared. For many working-class worshipers, it was increasingly difficult even to find a Protestant church to attend. As the church adopted an increasingly middle-class stance, it not only alienated many workers but also discovered compelling reasons to abandon physically the working-class neighborhoods of the metropolis in order to flee to suburban or rural environments.WEGW 93.10

    The changes accompanying the abrupt rise of urban-industrial America were so disturbing to so many people that one historian aptly described the years from 1890 to 1917 as a shake-up period. During that epoch new forms of organization—national labor unions and large corporations—challenged the nation’s traditional, individualistic norms and values; the metropolis intruded on rural and small-town life. At the same time, the primary agents of change themselves evolved rapidly. The idealistic Knights of Labor, for example, lost out to the more cautious American Federation of Labor in the 1890s. Eventually, after labor and management learned to resolve most of their differences through collective bargaining, industrial violence waned. And as memories of the nation’s preindustrial past faded, Americans more or less reconciled themselves to the corporations, labor unions, and cities that defined American life in the twentieth century. Indeed, many today find it difficult to understand fully the forebodings expressed by the first generation of Americans to confront an urban-industrial world.WEGW 93.11

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