On Monday, July 23, 1877, the national railroad strike, which had started in the East and spread west, reached Chicago. Before it had run its course, the city's railroad walkout mushroomed into a general strike and polarized the city along class lines. During the first two days of the strike, what one paper termed “roaming committees of strikers,” often trailed by ragtag bands of teenage boys, were able to commandeer the streets in the industrial sections of the city. Pausing at each freight- and lumberyard, shop, and factory, they called out the workers to strike for a restoration of wages and the eight-hour day. In many cases, proprietors simply shut up shop and told their employees to go home, hoping to avoid a strike that might make a formal wage claim. Throughout, the mood of the crowds was buoyant, like being “out on holiday,” according to one reporter.Footnote 1
During this time, the Chicago police were nowhere to be seen. Fearing property damage and riots, Mayor Monroe Heath decided not to have the police or militia board trains, escort strikebreakers, or do anything that might result in bloodshed. But with the inauguration of a general walkout and with the Socialists on the verge of assuming leadership of the strike, business leaders intervened. A delegation of Board of Trade businessmen called on the mayor, imploring him to confront the strikers more aggressively. On Wednesday, Heath convened a mass meeting and called for 5,000 citizens to organize themselves into auxiliaries of the police. That evening the police broke up a Socialist mass meeting and subsequently confronted and ruthlessly dispersed the crowds of workingmen thronging the streets. The Chicago Times editorialized that it had been a mistake to let the mob “run unmolested Tuesday.” Two days later the Chicago Tribune wrote: “The police are gradually beginning to shoot with lead in front of their powder and shoot lower; it would have been much better if the Mayor had allowed this to be done Tuesday—it was a day lost.” By the time Chicago's great labor upheaval had been suppressed, thirty workingmen and boys lay dead, and 200 had been wounded.
The attitude of authorities in New York City toward the Socialists and the strike in its early stages could not have been more different from the temporizing approach of the Chicago mayor, who had sought a middle route between labor and capital, and had to be prodded into action by a delegation of business leaders. Many New Yorkers vividly recalled the 1874 Tompkins Square affair, when police viciously attacked a peaceable meeting called by a committee of labor and Socialist organizations. Samuel Gompers remembered it “as an orgy of brutality,” but the mayor and the city's elite were elated at the suppression of the Socialist menace, and on the initiative of Police Inspector Thomas F. Byrnes, later Chief of Police, the police began to smuggle spies into labor and socialist meetings. When a strike was threatened on July 25, 1877, there was no division in the upper class or equivocating by city authorities. They mobilized two regiments of the national guard, cancelled all police leaves, brought out two Gatling guns, and readied a thousand sailors and marines—all in response to a single mass meeting called by the Socialists. As the orderly meeting of perhaps 15,000 was dispersing, policemen without provocation again attacked the crowd. The strike wave of that year skipped New York City.Footnote 2
The different responses to the threat of labor unrest by municipal authorities in Chicago and New York are not easily explained by the dominant framework for understanding the three-sided relation of (1) workers and organized labor, (2) employers and business leaders, and (3) party leaders and municipal officials. For more than three decades, scholars have worked within an understanding compounded of and derived from four historical specialties. Historians and students of American political development of the Gilded Age have cast the post-Reconstruction years as one in which the triumph of a capitalist class produced a retreat from the democratic thrust of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which was epitomized by restrictions on voting and political participation by Southern freedmen and Northern immigrant workers.Footnote 3 Urban scholars of this period have not been particularly interested in labor relations, but have centered their attention on explaining the rise of machine politics. When they have dealt with urban workers, they have linked the rise of machine politicians to the incorporation of immigrant workers’ political aspirations through the use of patronage, informal provision of personal welfare, and limited concessions.Footnote 4 Reinforcing this picture, labor historians tell a story in which, following the defeat of the Knights of Labor and attendant independent labor party forays in 1886–87, organized labor learned to forgo mass movements and third-party politics, and instead accommodated to party machines on the basis of their ethnic or sectoral identities, while retreating to the private sector to pursue more winnable struggles on the basis of class identities.Footnote 5 Finally, the above complex of scholarship dovetails with the view of 1970s ethno-cultural historians, who demonstrated that partisan divides in this period were closely correlated to ethno-religious rather than class identities.
Though the above generalizations have withstood challenges for more than three decades, the contrast between New York's and Chicago's responses to the 1877 railroad strike suggests at least four limitations. First, the standard conclusions, especially those regarding labor and machine politics, primarily stem from research based on New York and the rule of Tammany Hall, ignoring cities with quite different social, economic, and regional characteristics like Chicago.Footnote 6 The nation's urban life cannot be viewed as New York writ large.Footnote 7 Second, to the degree that New York-based generalizations hold true, they paint a picture with too broad a brush, generalizing from the common denominators existing among different cities and telling us little about the variations present across a range of cities, differentiated by size, economy, region, dominant ethnic group, and other factors. Third, not allowing for heterogeneity, these generalizations don't seek to explain variations in the ongoing interaction between urban employers, workers, and political leaders. We need to know what factors and circumstances facilitated or inhibited the ability of employers to control, defeat, accommodate to, or preempt working-class political power. Finally, the ruling narrative reinforces the ideology of American exceptionalism—a framework that seeks to explain why no American labor or socialist party existed—which has come under justifiable criticism in recent decades.Footnote 8
This article does not offer an alternative theory of American urban politics. It does offer a detailed comparison between Gilded Age New York and Chicago both to argue against the standard narrative and to offer suggestions for its rethinking. The article uses the exercise of sanctioned force by the police to suppress or deter organized strikes in order to illuminate the historical development of both cities’ political leadership, their governing coalitions, and the relationship of both to the emerging organizations and leadership of workers and capitalists. By generalizing from the differences between these two cities in the policing of labor disputes, this article also offers some lines of investigation that might better explain why Gilded Age cities differed in their sociopolitical relations. Specifically, it argues for shifting the emphasis away from the success or failure of labor, socialist, or populist parties toward the more wide-ranging effect these and other forms of labor organization had in fashioning a bloc of labor voters whose influence could be detected in the platforms and campaign rhetoric of major party candidates and in the policies and legislation of municipal administrations. It is a shift of focus from explaining something that did not happen—durable mass labor parties—to what actually did happen. The article suggests that, where certain conditions were present, working-class influence on the polity could be quite considerable.
Police policy toward strikes and other forms of working-class action is one of the best measures of labor's strength relative to other social groups and to the local state. As a public good it could not easily be parceled out as in the distribution of tariff benefits or public lands. It was a zero-sum public good that required an either/or choice between the interests of competing social groups. Thus, the behavior of the police at any historical moment has always reflected the changing balance of forces in the local community. As police historian James F. Richardson has put it, “If the authorities favored the workers or were at least neutral, the police remained neutral. If, on the other hand, political leaders and newspapers viewed the strikers as un-American radicals or a threat to a town's prosperity by making industry reluctant to locate there, then the police acted as agents of employers in their strikebreaking activities.” The use of the police was a major working-class issue in late nineteenth-century cities, and the way this issue was resolved can serve as a critical measure of the strength of working people in the local polity.Footnote 9
URBAN REGIME FORMATION: NEW YORK AND CHICAGO IN THE 1870S
In the decade of the 1870s, both Chicago and New York underwent deep-seated sociopolitical crises that concluded in political settlements and enduring regimes that defined these urban polities for the next generation. Both cites had experienced an increase in public spending on administrative positions and public infrastructure in the seven years following the Civil War, when cities began to issue bonds that could be floated on European capital markets and the new American markets centered on Wall Street. Whether it was the paving of streets, constructing waterworks and sewers, or subsidizing railroads, cities spent lavishly. At a time when state debt stagnated, per-capita municipal debt in the country doubled from $6.36 in 1860 to $13.38 in 1870.Footnote 10 The municipal financial-construction bubble of the 1866–73 period spawned enormous opportunities for fraud, bribery, corruption, and outright theft. It also served as the glue that welded together a broad governing coalition, including workers, that backed the Democratic Party's “Tweed Ring” in New York and the People's Party in Chicago.Footnote 11 Well before the 1873 financial crash, the bubble burst in each city, sparking a reaction among each city's emerging capitalist classes.
New York's Tweed Ring operated the most corrupt urban government in America. Tweed and his compatriots looted the public treasury; orchestrated widespread voter fraud; and used public offices to deliver contracts, charters, bribes, and subsidies to their business allies. But the Ring was not simply designed to extract rents. Emerging in the wake of the peace settlement that followed the 1863 Draft Riots, the city's new political order served the purpose of maintaining social stability by linking the Irish proletariat and the institutions of the Catholic Church with real estate operators, financiers, promoters, and railroad tycoons, all coordinated by the band of political entrepreneurs led by Tweed. The Tweed Ring welded together this diverse coalition and maintained social peace by using public debt to finance a construction boom that stimulated the city's growth and recycling much of its material resources to its impoverished political base through patronage and public works jobs.Footnote 12
Tammany began to lose its grip on its working-class base following the trade union revival of 1868, which featured the growing unionization of the building trades and the spread of socialism. But it was the Orange Riot that precipitated Tweed's downfall. Tammany Mayor A. Oakey Hall's police commissioner tried to avert the riot by prohibiting the march of anti-Catholic Orangemen through Irish-Catholic neighborhoods. But, under pressure from New York's better sort, the governor intervened to allow the clearly provocative march to proceed. A bloodbath ensued, with sixty-seven people killed and another 150 injured. Police Commissioner Henry Smith expressed his disappointment that “that there were not a larger number killed…. Had one thousand of the rioters been killed, it would have had the effect of completely cowing the remainder.” Elite New Yorkers concluded from the affair that Tweed could not be trusted to “keep the Irish in line,” control strikers, or keep social peace in the city.Footnote 13
The inability of Boss Tweed to protect the city against Irish workers in an outburst rivalling the 1863 Draft Riots in lawlessness and bloodletting made actionable the issue of corruption in the letting of city contracts and the spending of public monies. Following the riot, overseas bankers refused to fund the city's bonds, triggering a fiscal crisis. Leading citizens called a great reform meeting and formed the Committee of Seventy, which, according to Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, “spearheaded a concerted refusal by a thousand property owners to pay municipal taxes until the books of the city were audited.” After being charged with corruption, Tweed resigned, and voters elected in his stead a reform ticket headed by wealthy sugar refiner William Havemeyer.Footnote 14
The new administration implemented a policy of retrenchment and scuttled existing projects for infrastructural improvements. These same Democratic Party business leaders, known as “Swallowtails,” handpicked “Honest John” Kelly to rid Tammany of its Tweed Ring ties and reorganize, centralize, and strengthen the party apparatus. Kelly's reorganization of Tammany made local units subject to review by Tammany's central body, attached powers to party roles and offices rather than to individuals, and subjected public officials to the control and discipline of the party. Notwithstanding Kelly's reforms, Tammany was unable to fully control the Democratic Party, with the Irving Hall and County Democracy factions remaining independent until the late 1880s.Footnote 15 Through Kelly, the Swallowtails dominated city government. Every mayor elected between 1872 and 1886 was a prominent merchant or manufacturer, and the Swallowtails had major representation among aldermen and lesser city offices. According to historian David C. Hammack, the years from 1872 to 1886 constituted “the era of the Swallowtails.”Footnote 16
Martin Shefter has insightfully analyzed the differences between businessmen enmeshed in the Tweed Ring and the Swallowtails backing Kelly. At the top of Tweed's governing coalition were businessmen like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John J. Astor, James Fiske, Jay Gould, and August Belmont, promoters and financiers who made their fortunes from the rapid acquisition of wealth through the buying and selling of franchises, land, and gold, resulting in monopoly profits. Tweed helped these men get judges’ support and legislative approval of franchise or railroad charters. Those who composed the Committee of Seventy and supported Kelly were very different. They were corporate lawyers, large-scale employers, and merchants who relied on good faith bargaining. Rather than prioritizing high-risk and short-term speculative ventures, they valued predictability and stability and managed their enterprises to be successful over the long run. The shift in business-political leadership roughly corresponds to the transition detected by Sven Beckert between a mercantile and financial bourgeoisie oriented toward the trans-Atlantic economy and an industrial and investment banking one embedded in continental industrialization.Footnote 17
The new Democratic Party was a study in contrast to the Tweed regime. While Irish officeholders remained the most visible of all ethnic groups in city government, they no longer dominated Tammany, much less the other party factions. According to Anthony Gronowicz's comprehensive study, by 1884 the Irish held only 14 percent of positions within the Democratic Party compared to the old stock's 64 percent. More tellingly, the city's working class was “largely shut out of active participation within the ruling party and elective office.”Footnote 18
Under the Swallowtail regime the police brutally repressed workers’ strikes and Socialist activities. The first indication of a new more militant attitude on the part of employers and the police came in 1872 during an eight-hour day strike of 100,000 workers from fifty-two crafts, which represented two-thirds of the manufacturing workforce. Initially supported by artisan employers, the fear of striker coercion and the presence of Socialists polarized the city along class lines. The turning point came at the plant of William Steinway, a once pro-union, artisan employer. There, policemen clubbed strikers and escorted strikebreakers across picket lines. The police soon extended their actions to other workplaces closed by the strike. Meanwhile, small artisan employers abandoned their old paternalistic ethic toward their employees, and for the first time employers organized along class lines.Footnote 19
In Chicago, the People's Party was the equivalent to the Tweed Ring, but its overthrow set off an extended crisis that resulted in a settlement quite different from the one in New York. The People's Party was a short-lasting political formation that appeared in the early 1870s during a period of political instability in which the city's antebellum booster regime, serving a social fabric of small producers and large merchants, proved unable to meet the new economic and social needs of the city. The new business leadership that sought to supplant the boosters closely resembled the Swallowtails, but unlike them was unable to vanquish its rivals.
The boosters were “Christian gentlemen” who ruled a modest civil society in frontier Chicago, consisting of churches, Christian reform associations, charities, and philanthropic societies. Coexisting with these elite institutions were the ethnic and artisan societies of small producers. The boosters leveraged their business ties with eastern families and outside financial interests to fund their own business ventures and cash in on their real estate speculation, and they ran the city as mayors and city councilmen. Because their activities helped increase the size of the city and its land values, which benefitted all property owners, social conflict with small producers was rare in the antebellum period. What bound the boosters and their followers together was the principle that local government not be used to redistribute the property of the small producers either upward to a capitalist elite or downward to a growing proletariat.Footnote 20
Between the Civil War and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, a new business and civic leadership based in the city's industrial and commercial economy sought to supplant the boosters. A pivotal event occurred in restructuring the Chicago Relief and Aid Society. Before the war, the society had operated under the principle of Christian charity with volunteers investigating applicants and dispensing moral instruction along with temporary aid. In 1867, leading capitalists restructured it. Shunting aside the old booster elite, the revamped society took onto its board leading industrialists and department store owners along with their lawyers, and this cadre centralized and professionalized the society. Four years later, the fire provided the opportunity to demonstrate a new approach to charity. With the help of reform mayor Roswell Mason, the society took charge of the relief funds pouring in from outside the city. The society's leaders feared that a city government, which had fallen into the hands of professional politicians elected by the city's largely immigrant population, would disburse the aid too liberally and undermine the incentive to work at existing wages. In taking control of an old institution and repurposing its role in civil society to one of rationalizing the new social relations of wage work, the new business elite had been forced to bypass city government.Footnote 21
Another confrontation with the old regime occurred in the aftermath of the Great Fire, when the city's business enterprises faced a crisis of capital accumulation. Like much of the West, the city was still largely dependent on outside sources for capital investment, a condition that would not be alleviated in Chicago until the 1880s. Thus, the Chicago Tribune endorsed a German banker for mayor, arguing, “What the people of Chicago need in order to rebuild the burnt district and restore matters to their former condition is the abundant use of foreign and Eastern capital.” The immediate condition for restoring investor confidence was reassuring eastern fire insurance companies that new investment in the city was worth the risk of issuing insurance policies. Joseph Medill, who was eventually elected mayor a month after the fire, settled on a three-pronged program to restore investor confidence. He proposed to extend the limits within which only brick buildings could be constructed to propitiate the insurance companies; he asked the state legislature to centralize in the hands of the mayor appointments to the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners; and he decided to enforce the city's Sunday closing law as a social control measure to assuage the concerns of the city's Protestant churches.Footnote 22
The three measures unleashed a firestorm that would roil the city's public sphere for the next five years and whose reverberations lasted well into the Gilded Age. While the conflict would help forge the associations, the class unity, and the public thought necessary for a hegemonic project among the city's capitalists, it also mobilized enough opposition to make that project impossible to achieve.
The proposed limits on wood-built construction most affected the area of the city occupied by German middling elements; 44 percent of all German property holders lived in wards destroyed by the fire. Opposition to the fire limits was soon joined by two leading members of the old booster elite whose land speculations would be hit hard by the new ordinance. The spokesman for the opposition was Anton Hesing, liquor manufacturer, editor of the city's main German newspaper The Illinois Staats Zeitung, and leading member of the old booster coalition. Hesing termed the issue “essentially a question of the ownership of capital.” The proposed ordinance, according to his paper's editorial, “creates advantages for big capital at the expense of small capital, that makes the rich richer and poor poorer.” In a march on City Hall, Hesing defended immigrant workers as the ones who had built the city and whose ability to turn the fruits of their labor into home ownership was at risk. These men were not content to continue to live in the barracks constructed by the Relief and Aid Society to tide them through the winter. Hesing and his allies rejected the idea that Yankee leaders, by which they meant the large capitalists of the city and their allies, should alone define the public good in a cosmopolitan city like Chicago. By making it impossible to own a home, Hesing charged that Medill and the city's new business leaders were turning western immigrant workers into an Old World proletariat capable of unleashing another Paris Commune.Footnote 23
Though the fire limits issue was eventually compromised in the City Council, the antagonisms it inflamed opened the way to two critical developments. First, it split the business community and the Republican Party regime along ethnic lines, thereby cutting off the new leadership from its German base. This made it impossible for future pro-capitalist reformers to be elected mayor. Second, it spawned a powerful urban ethnic populist movement with a base in the German and Irish communities, which mobilized immigrant workers and preempted the possibility of a working-class movement led by the new Socialists in the city.
Following the fire, Chicago had attracted job seekers from all parts of the country, arriving by railroad every day. By mid-May 1872, 45,000–55,000 craftsmen and laborers were engaged in the city's reconstruction. Local residents viewed these single men as volatile strangers, and when a crime wave ensued, Protestant temperance leaders lobbied strongly for the Sunday closing of saloons. Though Mayor Medill feared the political consequences of antagonizing a city electorate dominated by non-Protestant immigrants, he finally acceded to their demand and authorized police to shut down saloons.Footnote 24
The order stunned the city's foreign-born communities and galvanized them into action. At a mass protest meeting, a new political coalition took shape led by Hesing, representing the North Side Germans, and Daniel O'Hara, a Democratic politician representing the South Side Irish. The new party they formed, the People's Party, was more than an anti-temperance party. In sponsoring additional public works projects and supporting immigrant workers’ demands for relief made by marches on the Relief and Aid Society, it threatened the downward redistribution of capital much in the manner of New York's Tweed Ring.Footnote 25
The ascension of the People's Party also raised the question of the city's future character. Would it remain a Yankee Evangelical Protestant outpost or would it become a “cosmopolitan” world-class city? Because Mayor Medill had resorted to the old governing approach of the boosters, the new industrialists had forfeited the ability to argue for Chicago being both a cosmopolitan city and one led by “big” capital. That enabled Hesing and his allies to appropriate the old Yankee language of what Michael Kazin has called “the republican jeremiad.”Footnote 26 The new party, it was said, represented a producers’ order of small businessmen and working-class homeowners. The temperance question and the new urban populism it spawned cross-cut the class lines raised by the issue of capital accumulation following the fire and temporarily sidelined it. In the November election the People's Party, led by ethnic professional politicians, ousted the pro-Yankee, pro-investment reform leadership and swept into control of the City Council and the mayor's office.Footnote 27
Within the year, another threat to the leadership of the Yankee capitalists emerged. The city, like the rest of the country, was hit hard by the start of the 1873–78 depression. By December 1873, at least 20 percent of the city's manufacturing workers were unemployed. In many of the nation's urban centers, workers marched to demand work or bread under native-born leadership, but in Chicago foreign-born Lassallean Socialists mobilized the discontented. On December 22, 10,000 immigrant workers marched on City Hall. According to the Chicago Tribune, the march seemed to the native-born “like lightning from a clear sky.” Not only did the march raise fears of a domestic version of the Paris Commune, but the leaders of the march demanded that the Relief and Aid Society turn over its remaining funds to the newly installed People's Party government to provide public works jobs or relief. By demanding democratic control over the relief funds, the Socialists directly challenged Yankee capitalists’ control over the institutions of civil society and threatened its leverage over the laborers engaged in rebuilding the city.Footnote 28
With the ascension of the populist People's Party to power, Chicago's Yankee capitalists were unable to violently repress the city's workers, as the New York Swallowtails would do a month later in Tompkins Square. Instead, Chicago's Yankee capitalists adapted. They would no long rely on native-born boosters and their churches to run the city. As one prominent member put it, “we will have no temperance or sumptuary nonsense,” which had stirred up such a hornet's nest. Directly contesting for civic authority, the “best men” formed the Citizens Association. Led by dry goods merchant Franklin MacVeagh, the new association included on its central committee the leading businessmen of the city. Its premise was that “the better portion of the community” had been “disfranchised” and that an organization was needed to “create such a public opinion as will secure the nomination and election of fit and property-owning men to the city offices.”Footnote 29
The best men also cut their ties with the old Protestant churches. A year after the formation of the Citizens Association, an ex-communicated liberal Presbyterian minister David Swing formed the new nondenominational Central Church of Chicago. It had the backing of fifty wealthy men, including MacVeagh and Medill, each contributing $1,000. According to the Chicago Times, Swing's support comprised “three-fourths of all the brains, courage, and progress of the city of Chicago.” In his sermons, Swing lauded a “class of human beings, educated, moral, often rich, and always powerful” and urged this class to exercise a “stewardship” in keeping with their high ideals. Swing's preaching in the Central Church bolstered the confidence of the Yankee capitalists that acting on their class interests and class position was equivalent to acting on the general interests of society.Footnote 30
But while these two exemplary developments in class self-organization indicated the aspiration of Yankee capitalists to exercise the kind of political authority that the Swallowtails had in New York, they were unable to extend their leadership into the social terrain still occupied by the new foreign-born working class and middling elements, which had stepped onto the public stage as populists a year earlier.Footnote 31 Despite abjuring temperance and forming the Central Church, the city's leading men could never disentangle themselves from Evangelical Protestant culture. That was evident in the 1876 mass revival held in Chicago by the preacher Dwight L. Moody.
Funded by Yankee capitalists and other wealthy Chicagoans, the revivals preached renewed self-restraint and self-discipline, which Protestant leaders connected with the need for fiscal restraint in city government. Moody himself identified the threats to such restraint as coming from Catholics and immigrants. Not surprisingly, the revivals had almost no success penetrating Catholic and Lutheran foreign-born communities. By consolidating the English-speaking, Protestant middle class with the city's new industrial magnates, the revivals contributed to class polarization but fell far short of establishing the bourgeoisie's strategic and moral leadership in the city.Footnote 32
A second reason Yankee capitalists were unable to establish an enduring hegemonic regime lay in the city's businessmen's response to the depression. Rather than uniting behind the broad program for reform offered by the Citizens Association, one that included governmental centralization, professionalization of the police and fire departments, and creation of a professionalized militia to protect property from urban mobs, the overriding concern of the business class shrunk to reducing the taxation of their property. A popular tax revolt gripped the city's well-to-do after 1873. Their refusal to pay taxes on their corporate property undercut the ability of the municipal government to govern and fueled the Citizens Association's argument that People's Party politicians should be ousted from power for their profligacy. The election of 1876 installed another bipartisan liberal reform mayor, but it would be the last for a generation.Footnote 33
The stage was set for the 1877 strikes. While the handling of the 1877 railroad strikes in New York confirmed the rule of the Swallowtails and Tammany, Chicago's new industrialists paid a steep price for persuading the liberal Republican Mayor Heath to violently suppress the general strike. German, Bohemian, and Irish workers, united during the strike and outraged at the police repression, became politicized and mobilized under the leadership of the Socialists. Additionally, enforcement of the temperance law and Moody's revivals had alienated a large number of liberal Germans from the Republican Party. Taking advantage of opportunity, the Socialist Labor Party in 1879 nominated a popular liberal German, Ernst Schmidt, to run for mayor on a third-party ticket. Schmidt's 19 percent of the vote peeled enough German votes away from the Republican candidate to throw the election to Democratic nominee Carter H. Harrison. Unable to deliver the social peace requisite to capital accumulation, the Republican Party, which had ruled the city since 1857, collapsed, and a very different governing coalition took its place, coalescing within the Democratic Party.Footnote 34
Mayor Harrison cleared the path to his new regime by forthrightly repudiating the People's Party, the Evangelical Protestant-Republican elites who controlled the Relief and Aid Society, the Moody revivals, and the Citizens Association. At the same time, Harrison found ways to assuage the concerns of each of the constituencies of these politics: rank-and-file businessmen for low taxes, business leaders for municipal reform, and immigrant workers for socialism and immunity from the temperance laws and police repression. In a short inaugural address, he decried Chicago's “enormous” debt burden popularly associated with the People's Party's downward-redistributing public works spending and promised to “live within” the city's considerably reduced revenues. Next, he disassociated his administration from the Evangelicals by declaring that Chicago was a “cosmopolitan” city “aggregated from many nationalities.” By promising to only to enforce laws that “do the greatest good to the greatest number,” he rejected strict enforcement of the temperance and fire limits laws. Finally, Harrison granted legitimacy to the Socialists, a faction he needed to at least keep in the field as an independent party or, better yet, fold into his governing coalition. The Socialists, he said, should have the right to assemble, speak, and “keep and bear arms.”Footnote 35
Once in power, Harrison's new governing coalition implemented a new governing approach. Harrison appointed honest professionals and prominent businessmen, many of them Republicans, to head the posts of city comptroller, the Department of Public Works, and corporation counsel, positions most essential to controlling government spending. The Socialists, on the other hand, received the city's printing contract and posts on the boards governing the city's Health Department and the library. To avoid another 1877, Harrison retained political control of the city's police department, appointing police lieutenants and a police chief accommodating to organized workers and refusing to interfere in Socialist gatherings and militia activities.Footnote 36
The defeat of the People's Party and ascension of Harrison in Chicago and the replacement of the Tweed Ring with Boss Kelly and the Swallowtails in New York had much in common. Each political settlement ratified the decline of an economy based on trading, real estate speculation, and artisan manufacturing and the ascension of one based on large-scale industry and finance. Each represented a shift away from the use of public debt to leverage capital accumulation toward a largely private mode. Both the New York and Chicago regimes retrenched government spending, centralized control of public expenditures in the hands of pro-business administrators, stabilized or reduced the reliance on public debt, and adopted the watchwords of efficiency and honesty. In the United States as a whole, municipal debt actually decreased in the deflationary 1880s and increased only modestly during the period from 1870 to 1890.Footnote 37
But there were crucial differences. Harrison was not a party boss, but a personalistic leader, reliant on his charisma and the brokering of diverse interests. The man most resembling a Chicago boss was gambling “king” Mike McDonald, who helped fund the party to win immunity for his illicit gambling operations. But McDonald lacked access to state patronage jobs and could never dictate nominations, nor did he ever attain the kind of respectability Kelly did in New York. Meanwhile, the Iroquois Club, composed of Democratic Party businessmen, never approached the kind of broad power enjoyed by Swallowtails. For Harrison, businessmen were one of many constituencies to be mollified. There was never the kind of symbiosis with the Democratic Party that New York businessmen enjoyed before 1886. In short, not only did Chicago's regime lack a “machine,” but it did not have the unqualified support and deep participation of substantial businessmen that New York's Tammany did; indeed, Chicago business leaders retreated from city politics under Harrison.Footnote 38
POLICING STRIKES AND POLITICAL REFORM IN TWO REGIMES, 1878–1894
The biggest difference between the two regimes was the obvious power and the informal clout wielded by organized labor and Socialists within the Harrison regime. The best measure of that power was the use of police during strikes. There are two common frameworks in the study of the police, each of which has important drawbacks. In one approach, common to labor and working-class historians, the police are seen to be an instrument of class power. They typically serve the need to reproduce and legitimate the class hierarchies of a capitalist society. This usually unstated view may be one reason why studies of the police in relation to labor are virtually absent from labor history. A quite different approach examines the bureaucratization, professionalization, and militarization of the police as part of a broader process of modernization and state formation that occurred in the United States and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this approach impartial enforcement of the law is the norm, and deviations from that standard are treated as evidence of lags in modernization or corruption. While both approaches point to important structural developments, each tends to ignore or treat as peripheral the ways in which the development of the police and their relation to other sectors of urban society have been historically contingent and politically determined.Footnote 39
In Chicago, the use of the police in labor disputes and in attacking Socialist meetings evolved as a counterpoint to their use in the last three days of the 1877 strikes. In the immediate aftermath of the strikes, the legitimacy of state violence against strikers moved to the center of public discourse. Though the police had instigated virtually all of the violence used to put down the 1877 disorders, militias loyal to the respectable classes and those formed by immigrant workers loomed in the background of the fighting. One Socialist went so far as to term the 1877 fighting as “armed political competition.” After the strike, Socialists expanded their militias with the express purpose of defending themselves against the police and national guard, and state legislators responded by passing a law banning the public drilling of private militias. The Socialists augmented their influence when they assumed leadership of the Trades and Labor Assembly, and in the fall 1877 elections, the Socialist vote, swelled by trade union sympathizers, became a significant force in city politics with its strength concentrated in the precincts where the fighting in 1877 had been most intense. The following year, the Socialists elected three representatives to the state general assembly.Footnote 40
The ability of civic leaders to respond to this crisis was dependent on the laws structuring control over the police. In New York City, after 1870 the police were supervised by a depoliticized board of commissioners. The commissioners, supplied by the Committee of Seventy, were equally divided between Democrats and Republicans and were virtually immune from mayoral removal. Chicago's police, on the other hand, were directly under the mayor's control and far more politicized. The mayor could appoint the police commissioner and control promotions. With these powers Mayor Harrison was able to propitiate and pacify both labor and business leaders.Footnote 41
A year after becoming mayor, Harrison appointed a new police superintendent for the city, William J. McGarigle, who was willing to consult with labor and was sympathetic to the aggrieved Irish. To patrol the Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport, Harrison designated as lieutenant a personal favorite, John Byrne, a liberal Irish Catholic who believed in abstaining from police violence when dealing with “rioters.” The impact was immediate. In the Bridgeport-based strikes of brickmakers, blast furnacemen, and iron ore shovelers, Byrne's police stayed neutral, allowing strikers to intimidate and rout strikebreakers, much as they had done during the first two days of the 1877 strike. Meanwhile, the Trades and Labor Assembly regularly sent delegations to City Hall to procure police neutrality. During a violent iron molder strike in 1881 a labor committee reported that the police superintendent had removed police from the picket line and “showed every desire … to satisfy your committee in all points.” Two years later another committee convinced the superintendent to withdraw a police detail guarding Western Union's property during a telegraphers’ strike. After labor won a streetcar strike in 1882, Joe Gruenhut, a Socialist appointed by Harrison to the leadership of the Health Department, observed that “if 100 policemen had been furnished, to man the streetcars of the West Division City Railway Company, … the strikers would have been compelled to accept the company's terms of unconditional surrender.” Instead, the strikers achieved a glorious victory. Gruenhut exulted that under Harrison, Chicago was becoming “a working-class democracy, the like of which had never existed before.”Footnote 42
Harrison propitiated business reformers in the Citizens Association by acceding to their wishes to substantially increase the size of the police force, improve its recruitment standards, and adopt a new communications system to raise its efficiency.Footnote 43 But this was far from satisfactory to business leaders. Their thinking was captured in an exchange of letters between the young Cyrus McCormick and Chicago's leading packer, Phil Armour, during a strike of iron molders. Having abandoned his father's support of Harrison in that year's city election, McCormick complained they he had lost his police support during the strike. Armour advised McCormick to settle with his men to avoid “an open war” between classes.Footnote 44 In its 1885 report the Citizens Association decried the results of democratic politics. Politicians, said the report referring to Harrison, found it “inexpedient to enforce peace ordinances” because of “how easy it is to calculate the probable effect of a prompt, bold, and determined attitude against a large body of defiant rioters who have ballots to cast in the early future.”Footnote 45
In New York, where the post-Tweed Democratic Party was “of but not for labor,” things were quite different.Footnote 46 The resort by the city's government to spectacular coercion to defeat the 1872 eight-hour day general strike, to break up the 1874 Tompkins Square protest meeting, and to preempt the spread of the 1877 strike to the city continued into the 1880s. The limitations faced by strikers were evident in an 1883 cigar makers’ strike when a delegation from the Central Labor Union visited police headquarters to ask authorities how far pickets could go in discouraging strikebreakers from taking their places. A police captain advised the men that strikers could “tell workmen who were about to enter a shop that the employes were on strike. But, they must not try to dissuade them from going to work, even if the most polite language was used, for that would be construed as intimidation and would render the pickets liable to arrest.” As in Chicago, the city's Central Labor Union sent numerous delegations to the police commissioners complaining of treatment on union picket lines but never received redress.Footnote 47
With the weight of superior numbers and persuasive speech denied them during strikes, New York labor turned to the labor boycott with an intensity lacking in Chicago.Footnote 48 The popularity of the boycott grew out of the experience of the Irish Land League where the term meant the shunning of those who violated community norms. The boycott was well-suited to New York and Brooklyn because the economies of these locales were modest in scale with low capital requirements for entry, labor-intensive, and produced consumer goods and services intended primarily for the local working-class market. These features were particularly evident in garment manufacturing, cigar making, printing, baking, and construction. By shifting the locus of confrontation from the workplace to interpersonal relationships within the community where scabs could be “let severely alone,” the boycott made police interference moot. The first general trade union paper in the city grew out of an 1884 printers’ strike in which Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune called in the police to protect strikebreakers resulting in the imprisonment of union members. The local union called a boycott of the Tribune and established a paper appropriately called The Boycotter. Beginning in the spring of 1885, a flood of boycotts hit the city, and that year's Report of the State Bureau of Labor Statistics centered its attention on the new tactic. The prosecution and conviction in 1886 of union members for boycotting the Theiss saloon, combined with massive police repression in a series of streetcar strikes and a related scandal involving bribes to secure a streetcar franchise, were the issues that set off the movement in New York for independent labor politics and the Henry George campaign for mayor that year.Footnote 49
By contrast, the issue that fueled the Great Labor Upheaval in Chicago was the eight-hour day. Boycotting was not a major issue in the city until 1886, and even then, no labor men were indicted. However, the eight-hour day issue might not have gained much traction in the city had not the police resumed their interference in strikes. During an 1885 streetcar strike, intense business pressure forced Harrison to allow a brutal, antilabor police captain, John Bonfield, to guard strikebreakers. The strike was lost, as were others, in the spring of 1886. So well did Bonfield meet the need of employers that rumors among labor leaders had it that he was secretly in the pay of leading capitalists. Labor's ranks were split on whether to break from Harrison on this issue. Then, on May 4, 1886, Bonfield's notorious assault on a peaceable labor meeting at Haymarket Square and the repression that ensued jolted labor out of its alliance with the Harrison regime. Labor organizations combined with local Socialists to form a labor party, which ran tickets in November 1886 and in the spring 1887 mayoral election. Harrison refused the Democratic Party's nomination for mayor and implicitly endorsed the labor party.Footnote 50
In 1886–1887, police labor practices in the two cities, so divergent in previous years, momentarily converged. On the eve of the eight-hour strikes in New York, Gompers noted that “police brutality against New York workers became so flagrant that labor's patience reached a breaking point.” That spring, The Boycotter was full of reports of police “outrages.” Both the Dry Dock and the Third Avenue streetcar line strikes were beaten back with a “mammoth police presence” composed of a quarter of the city's police force. According to Burrows and Wallace, “Year after year platoons of police cracked skulls, broke up meetings, and smashed picket lines while press and politicians acquiesced or applauded wildly.” There is no record in New York of leading businessmen having to mobilize mass meetings, send delegations to the mayor, or issue public warnings to city government to secure police protection as in Chicago. Quite the opposite: At an 1892 dinner honoring the police, Chauncy M. Depew, president of the New York Central Railroad and soon to be a senator from New York, expressed the unbounded confidence that business leaders and the city's upper crust had in the police: “In any emergency, however great, in any danger, however imminent, in any crisis, however critical, in the history of this city, the New York police never have failed to do their duty and win a victory for law and order and safety.”Footnote 51
It wasn't simply during strikes; large contingents of police ready for action regularly flanked, monitored, infiltrated, and menaced labor's meetings and organizations. As a result, curbing the police became a major goal of Henry George's campaign that year. But, in the wake of George's defeat and the subsequent collapse of the United Labor Party, Tammany recaptured its constituency and further centralized its power. To do so, it implicated itself into the social life of its working-class voters by forming Tammany-controlled clubs, replete with family outings, their own buildings, and even a newspaper. But, this incorporation was far from complete. The threat of the George campaign to Tammany's base allowed labor to partially liberate itself from the Tammany yoke. According to Theodore Roosevelt, after 1886 labor had become “a new element to be bid for by the old parties,” and labor began to exercise limited influence over mayoral nominations, evident in the vetoing of objectionable candidates. Overall, however, “Tammany [took] few steps toward a rapprochement with organized labor between 1886 and 1896,” according to Hammack. Labor remained outside Tammany's governing coalition until 1897 when it added pro-labor planks to its campaign platform.Footnote 52
In the ten years after 1886, Tammany's policing of large strikes continued to rile labor. Byrne's police played a critical role in defeating a large 1889 streetcar strike. According to Daniel Czitrom, “It was not simply the cracked skulls and broken limbs. In many instances policemen literally helped run the streetcars, managing the brakes, while inexperienced scab drivers looked after the horse teams.” In 1890, the building trades section of the city's Central Labor Union called on the State Senate's Fassett Committee, which was investigating New York City corruption, to investigate the entire police force. It charged that “the force as a body is dishonest, brutal, even criminal.” It summarized its experience with police strikebreaking this way:
The unfairness of the force has been manifested in nearly every labor strike that has occurred in this city. In scores of instances the police have openly taken sides as against strikers, clubbing and arresting them and their pickets, getting non-unionists to take the place of union men, driving cars for railroad companies, and accepting favors from them.Footnote 53
In Chicago, on the other hand, the political power of labor and the Socialists soon reasserted itself. The antilabor Republican John P. Roche, who had been elected in 1887 in Harrison's place, was compelled to dismiss Bonfield from the force in response to a scandal and resulting public outcry. In 1889, Chicagoans elected a new Democratic mayor, De Witt Cregier, who ran on a “semi-socialistic” program according to the Chicago Tribune and, once in power, tightened the regime's strategic ties with labor. One labor editor wrote, “It is safe to say there is nothing within the gift of the Democratic party of Chicago that the labor people cannot have by asking for it.” According to one unofficial estimate, more than 800 labor people, including most leaders of the old labor party, held jobs at either the city, county, or state level. Cregier also restored the neutral police policy of Harrison, enacted the eight-hour day for city employees, and mandated that some city hiring be done through union hiring halls. The Democratic Party had virtually remade itself to absorb the constituency of the defunct United Labor Party.Footnote 54
Labor relations in the city's construction industry epitomized labor's benefits. In 1890, Chicago's carpenters, the industry's largest trade, were in the midst of a successful struggle to establish the eight-hour day in the building of the Columbian Exposition. The union refrained from supporting an independent labor party because “this would exasperate the Democratic city administration and bring on the active opposition of the City Hall officials and the police.” Ten years later, with the construction workers’ unions desperately fighting to retain their dominant position in the industry, Mayor Carter Harrison's son Carter II, then mayor, had his police look the other way as union “educational committees” slugged scabs with impunity. Only another mobilization by the larger business community in the city forced a change in police policy.Footnote 55
In November 23, 1886, in the midst of labor's Great Upheaval, Carter Harrison delivered an invited speech before New York's leading businessmen that epitomized the differences between Chicago and New York. In his remarks, Harrison dissented from the idea that government had to “attend to morals and religion” and dismissed the idea that corruption was the problem of the day: “It is not corrupt men who make the worst governors, but ignorant men.” He lectured New York leaders on strategic leadership: “stop talking about protecting property; talk about protecting labor. You can put down the laborer's discontent by filling his mouth and teaching him about his rights. Give him his rights and discontent will cease. The … common man in this country has as much interest in good government as the millionaire. He is just as capable of good government, and as capable of telling who is the best man to govern him as the millionaire.” One can only imagine what Harrison's Gotham listeners thought of this advice, but the reaction could not have been very favorable.Footnote 56
The differences in the ways Chicagoans and New Yorkers constructed governing coalitions and conducted politics carried over into reform politics. Gotham's quixotic reform campaigns paid little more than lip service to labor issues before Seth Low's unsuccessful bid for mayor in 1897. The best known and most successful reform campaign was an anti-Tammany morals crusade emanating from the city's Protestant bourgeoisie and led by Rev. Charles Parkhurst, which climaxed in the formation of the 1894 Lexow Commission. The commission's testimony and findings led to the police commissioner's resignation, sparked a good government crusade that temporarily broke Tammany's hold on the mayor's seat, and according to Daniel Czitrom, lay the groundwork for the Progressive Era's “good government,” and “moral control” reform in the city. It was telling that the Lexow Commission's findings and the press's lurid exposes indicted the city's police for protecting brothels, abortionists, saloons, and gambling dens, but said next to nothing about the police suppression of strikes and labor meetings. The commission did not invite any representatives from organized labor to appear as witnesses in its hearings.Footnote 57
Chicago's reform impulse, occurring at the same time was quite different. Rather than prioritizing good government and good morals, it was “social reform,” a strand of Progressivism that originated in Midwest cities.Footnote 58 William T. Stead, the counterpart of Parkhurst, was a British social gospel minister who arrived in Chicago in 1893 to investigate the underside of the city and build a new church suited to urban industrialism, not restore the small-town moral order. In his popular book, If Christ Came to Chicago!, Stead attributed the city's sin and corruption not to the bad character of the poor but the greed and hardheartedness of the respectable upper class. Encouraged by the city's labor leaders, Stead founded the Civic Federation of Chicago, a centralized federation of civic associations including prominent labor and social settlement house workers. A leading premise of the Civic Federation was that working people could be as reliable allies for reform as the better sort. Two years later, the same spirit animated Chicago's Municipal Voter's League, called by urban historian James J. Connolly “the most substantial and successful effort” in the country to implement the new social reform politics. By the turn of the century, Ralph Easley, the energetic secretary of the Chicago Civic Federation, transferred what he had learned from his attempts at labor-capital conciliation to the national level with the founding of National Civic Federation (NCF). The NCF would play a major role in formulating progressive legislation and mediating labor disputes during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.Footnote 59
The contrast between cross-class social reform in Chicago and business-led moral or structural reform in New York did not extend into the Progressive Era. As demonstrated by Kenneth Finegold, in New York reformers responded to two populist campaigns for mayor by William Randolph Hearst by deemphasizing traditional moral reform and incorporating expert-led social welfare goals into their platforms and policies. This enabled them to successfully appeal to Hearst's immigrant populist base and construct a viable progressive coalition during the administration of John Purroy Mitchel. Meanwhile, Chicago's social reformers coalesced with immigrant populists during the two-year reign of Mayor Edward F. Dunne. But, following Dunne's defeat, the Democratic Party under Carter Harrison II regained its control of immigrant workers and, by the time of the New Deal, had created its own centralized machine. In New York, progressive political possibilities remained alive, enabling Fiorello H. La Guardia to create an enduring progressive regime during the New Deal. In short, by the end of the Progressive Era, New York had taken a quite different political path from the one established in the 1870s, while in Chicago the long-established dominance of organizational party politics was reconfirmed.Footnote 60
EXPLAINING THE DIFFERENCES
Why did the settlements to the crisis of the 1870s differ so markedly in Chicago and New York? What explains the differences in the type of governing coalitions, party and electoral alignments, and contrasting policies in policing strikes between the two cities? Examining the different paths each city took suggests at least two mutually reinforcing factors at work: (1) the regional differences between eastern and western urban political systems and their relative openness to labor and reform influences and (2) the relative strength of the Irish and Germans in each city's labor movement. Where Germans predominated, in the working class and cities located in the “Great West,” party organization and resources were weaker and workers had the ability to found and maintain independent labor or Socialist parties, which threatened to draw off votes, tugging local Democratic Parties leftward.
The Great West of the Gilded Age can be divided for political purposes into the midwestern, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific Coast regions. The farther west one went, according to Paul Kleppner and Martin Shefter, the weaker the hold of the two major parties. This is indicated by the higher incidence of split ticket voting, lower voter turnout rates, and weaker ethno-religious antagonisms in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Coast regions. Together, they reflected the weakness of party organization and party loyalties in the electorate. In the Midwest, partisanship was stronger than in the far West, but weaker than in the East. Third-party challenges—whether from labor, socialist, or populist parties—were widespread in the Midwest, while in the far West party loyalties were far weaker, and citizens experimented with direct democracy in the form of the initiative, referendum, and recall. Elizabeth S. Clemens has remarked, “Westerners were more likely to reject the party as an illegitimate form of political organization; midwesterners tended to attack Republicans or Democrats rather than the party form itself.”Footnote 61
Parties in New York and other eastern cities differed from midwestern cities like Chicago and those to the west of it in their strategies for responding to the threats posed by corruption and special interest politics, on the one hand, and outside competitors like civic reformers, urban populists, and organized workers, on the other. In the East, parties typically turned to patronage, which enabled them to centralize and bureaucratize their organizations and buy off rivals, including potential labor parties. But parties were weaker in western states and cities, which offered expanded opportunities for political innovation and for marginal groups to seize some power. On the western periphery, local and state parties were less broadly based and more loosely structured because these areas were much more recently settled, forcing local business and political notables to rely on the resources supplied by the railroads, mining corporations, and other outside interests rather than government revenues to fund party patronage.Footnote 62 These weak western parties were especially vulnerable to attacks from reformers for catering to special interests, while simultaneously being unable to withstand their reform initiatives. Though the above analysis has been used to explain the particular receptivity of parties in the Midwest and West to progressive reform politics, the same logic can be applied to working-class political initiatives in the Gilded Age, when the differences between East and Midwest were more pronounced.Footnote 63
These same regional differences were evident in the relative strength of German and Irish immigrants. Germans immigrated in larger numbers relative to the Irish to the Midwest, while the Irish dominated in eastern cities. In 1870, the top ten cities of over 50,000 in population ranked by percentage of Irish were all in the East or Mid-Atlantic states; none were in the Midwest. New York was third, with 21.4 percent Irish and only 16 percent German, while Chicago, which was eleventh with 13.4 percent Irish, had 17.5 percent Germans. Of the top ten German cities of over 50,000 in population, four of the top five were in the Midwest, with the number rising to eight of the ten if we include Buffalo, Allegheny, and Louisville, which were on the border of the Midwest. The only city in the East in which the percentage of Germans was greater than the percentage of Irish was Newark, while in the Midwest and its border cites, the ratio of the percentage of Germans to the percentage of Irish was greater than one in Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Louisville, Buffalo, and Allegheny.Footnote 64
Strengthening the role of Germans in Chicago and other midwestern cities was the fact that as immigrants they were part of the initial city-building process and did not have to integrate into pre-existing institutions as in eastern cities. Thus, they had the self-confidence to assert themselves as an independent force in local politics, starting as a response to attempts by temperance reformers in 1857 and 1872 to shut down their beer gardens. In Chicago, by 1860, pro-Republican Party ’48er refugees in Chicago helped shift the community from the Democratic to the Republican camp, and in the 1870s socialist and liberal Germans led that same community out of the party and into support for Carter Harrison. Throughout the Midwest, according to Paul Kleppner, the German vote in the early 1870s acted as a swing vote, shifting electoral strength from Republicans to Democrats. This did not happen in New York City where Germans were loyal Democrats. The most preeminent German, Oswald Ottendorfer, editor of the New York Staats Zeitung, made his paper the organ of the German bourgeoisie and stayed within the Democratic Party's orbit throughout the 1860s. Later, when German Democrats were unhappy, they merely switched their loyalties from Tammany to a different Democratic faction.Footnote 65
New York's Irish, on the other hand, were notoriously inflexible in their party loyalty. Unlike the Germans, the Irish were of one religion, voted at higher rates, and inherited English as their native language, which afforded them greater unity and influence in electoral politics. In response to the Protestant nativism of the 1850s, which in New York City extended through the Orange Riots of 1870–71, this largely working-class Irish voting bloc became closely identified with the Democratic Party and hoarded the patronage supplied by its machines. They were much less likely than the Germans to extend their loyalties to labor parties beyond a single election or take on the role of a swing vote between the two parties. As a result, despite having the largest labor movement in the country, New York's workers boasted only one major labor or socialist party initiative—the 1886 Henry George campaign—that achieved more than 1 percent of the mayoral vote. In local elections the party rarely gained over 1,000 votes citywide, and even in the German wards of the Lower East Side, voter turnout rarely exceeded 800 in the 1880s.Footnote 66 But the Irish Democratic machines in the East were still vulnerable. As Steven Erie has pointed out, unless these machines had access to state government patronage, as Tammany usually didn't, they were forced to practice a fiscal conservatism that limited their ability to satisfy their working-class base with city jobs. Only after the second-generation Irish seceded from the party in 1886 did Tammany look to appease working-class concerns. Labor's ability to exercise power as part of the Tammany governing coalition would await the twentieth century.Footnote 67
The difference between the Germans and Irish extended to the two principal issues raised within the working-class movement of the mid-1880s. New York labor journalist John Swinton credited the Germans who predominated in the trade unions with being the pioneers of the eight-hour movement, while the boycott was of Irish Land League and Knights of Labor origin, helping to explain the difference in emphasis between the Irish-dominated New York and German-influenced Chicago labor movements in 1886–87. Both issues generated classwide solidarity, but one was workplace-centered while the other was community-centered. Whether German or Irish influence predominated in a locale seems to have critically determined how class awareness and the balance in class relations developed.Footnote 68
When it came to third-party labor politics, the political tendencies separating most Germans and the Irish Catholics reinforced regional tendencies. Leon Fink's catalog of labor tickets fielded across the nation between 1885 and 1888 finds that more than half (97 of 189) were in Midwest or western cities; 11 percent were from the Mid-Atlantic states, while 20 percent were from New England. German-dominated Midwest cities had a well-documented tradition of labor and socialist party voting beginning with initiatives in the 1870s in Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Louisville. Though Germans typically shared leadership of these parties with allied ethnic groups and deferred to English speakers, these parties primarily relied on the loyalties of German voters, many of them organized in unions.
In Chicago, where the German foreign-born population's predominance over the Irish had grown from 1.3 to 1 in 1870 to 2.3 to 1 by 1890, labor unions and socialists were involved in a continuous run of electoral initiatives in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to which the Democratic Party had to respond. The Socialist Labor Party ran tickets in 1874, 1877, 1878, and 1879; local unions, together with the Knights of Labor, Socialists, Single-Taxers, and other reformers, fielded major labor party initiatives in 1886, 1887, and 1894, with lesser initiatives in 1888 and 1889.Footnote 69
A look at the Midwest's two “most German cities,” Milwaukee and St. Louis, confirms the causal connection between the Germans and third-party labor politics. In Milwaukee, the German-to-Irish foreign-born ratio was 8.6 to 1 in 1880; Poles were the second most numerous nationality in the city, and they were commonly allied with working-class Germans.Footnote 70 The city fielded important labor parties beginning in 1877 when the German-based Social Democrats elected a state assemblyman. In 1881, the trades assembly elected a pro-labor manufacturer as mayor and later in the year elected two state assemblymen. In 1886–87, the Knights of Labor–sponsored People's Party elected an entire slate of county officials, a U.S. congressman, and six state assemblymen. The next year, the party elected nine of the fourteen aldermen up for election. Measured by vote totals, the labor party had become one of the two major parties. In 1888, after the Democrats and Republicans fused, labor narrowly lost the spring mayoral elections, and the party declined into insignificance thereafter. However, another resurgence in Milwaukee's labor-based populist voting occurred in 1892, 1894, and 1896, though without the dominance enjoyed in the 1880s. In the late 1890s, the Victor Berger–led Socialist Party of America, with strong support from the city's central labor body, enjoyed a long string of electoral successes, including the election of socialist mayors, into the 1930s.Footnote 71
Without additional research, it is impossible to ascertain the impact of Milwaukee's labor's electoral successes on the actions of the police in labor disputes. The only study of the police in Milwaukee available, though fragmentary, argues that as a result of labor's political strength, the role of the police in strikes became a “political issue” in the city. According to Sidney L. Harring, “politicians responsive to the working-class resisted many police demands for increased resources, fought anti-working-class legislation, and struggled to assert some influence in the. development of the Milwaukee police.” To the degree that Milwaukee's police did not refrain from interference in strikes, it may have been due to the uncommon strength of independent labor politics, the resulting defensive unity of the city's Republicans and Democrats, and the absence of brokering by machine politicians.Footnote 72
St. Louis had a German-to-Irish ratio of 1.9:1 in 1880, which grew to 2.7:1 in 1890. After playing a leadership role in the 1877 general strike in the city, German Socialists, as in Chicago, entered a series of elections between October 1877 and April 1879. The party elected members to the school board and lower house of the city legislature. According to one quantitative study, the “most striking factor in the socialist appeal seems to be the size and composition of a ward's German community.” But, after 1879 the party's influence waned. In 1886–87 independent labor politics resumed and the labor party elected two candidates in a fusion with Republicans. In 1888, the United Labor Party garnered 20 percent of the citywide vote. During the early 1890s the city's central labor body returned to third-party politics in alliance with the populists. There seems to be no study of the police role in labor disputes.Footnote 73
Unlike the German-dominated midwestern cities, Boston, the most Irish city in the country with a ratio of Irish-to-German-born of 7:1 in 1890, had only one minor labor party attempt in this period, despite its strong labor movement. The United Labor Party's mayoral campaign in 1886 won less than 10 percent of the vote, and the party was insignificant thereafter.Footnote 74
In almost all cities where labor and socialist parties appeared, they typically failed to establish themselves as one of the two major parties. Yet, the prospect of losing votes in the general election in Chicago and elsewhere forced one of the two parties, usually the Democratic Party, to accommodate to the issues and concerns of working-class voters, even to the extent of incorporating labor into its governing coalition. The prominent advocate for independent labor politics, Henry Demarest Lloyd, observed that in Chicago:
The police have been so manipulated in case of strikes … as to favour the men, and give them the victory. It was impossible for the employers to introduce “scabs” because the police would not protect them from the suasion of the pickets, who were not over-scrupulous about restricting themselves to merely moral argument. When independent political action is broached in the lodges of a union which has thus been favored … those who have berths in the City Hall and are “henchmen” of the dominant party, are quick to point out that the union cannot expect police favours in the next strike if they wander form the old political fold.Footnote 75
What Lloyd missed was that independent labor politics was not foreclosed by the process he described but was its very premise. The willingness of workers under labor and/or socialist leadership to bolt the major parties for independent politics was part of an electoral dialectic between third-party politics and co-optation by the Democrats that conduced to establishing labor political power. Generalizing about labor's impact on nineteenth-century urban politics, David Montgomery remarked that “it was the Socialist presence in the German community that accounted for the appeal of labor legislation to local Democrats.”Footnote 76
As the comparison between New York and Chicago suggests, class and class conflict existed not only in the workplace or in occasional spurts of independent labor politics, but also penetrated, unsettled, and recast major party politics and urban governance. But, its impact on the ability of urban capitalists to win the consent of immigrant workers varied widely and is rarely examined comparatively. Several points are clear. In both Chicago and New York, Yankee capitalists lacked a moral common ground with the new, largely Catholic, immigrant working class and sought to remove their influence from politics, whether by denying them the vote or eliminating their influence in public office holding. This inability to secure consent and exercise strategic leadership in civil society meant that the bourgeoisies in both cities supported politicians who would use the police to defeat strikes, break up meetings of socialists, and overawe mass protest meetings. But their ability to do these things differed greatly across cities, varying according to the nature of the “settlements” that created regimes in the 1870s, region, the German-to-Irish ratio, strength of organized labor, the unity of the local bourgeoisie, and the degree of party centralization and patronage resources. Particularly in midwestern and western cities, like Chicago, where organized labor and reform movements were relatively strong, where parties were relatively weak, and/or where there were large German populations willing to swing their votes between the two parties, business leaders were compelled to tolerate regimes that accepted labor into their governing coalitions. If we accept this view, we might consider constructing hypotheses about labor's relation to urban politics and governance in which New York stands along a range as one among many variants rather than defining the rule. In the meantime, much research remains to be done.
Since the 1980s, historians and students of American political development have with some exceptions accepted the view that organized workers during the Gilded Age generally kept their militancy and assertiveness confined to the workplace and exercised minimal influence on urban governments. The comparison between Chicago and New York and between eastern and western cities should significantly qualify this generalization. The idea of a nonpolitical organized labor and a politically unchallenged capitalist class needs to be reformulated. Workers’ power did indeed have the ability, when conditions were right, to compel party politicians and employers to take account of, adapt to, and even bend over backwards to comply with their new grievances and claims to power.
