0002 Labor rights in 1884: Out of the ashes, into fire

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Chicago. May 1, 1884

Albert Parsons is drafting an article in his head, when at the northeast corner of Adams and LaSalle streets he notices a familiar scene of a great number of workingmen throwing themselves at rebuilding Chicago from the Great Fire thirteen years ago. He stops and asks one of them what will become of the site and is told in a German accent that they just began work on erecting “the world’s first modern skyscraper”. Now he remembers that his wife Lucy has told him about it. Parsons thanks him and walks away resisting from asking further questions lest the German gets into trouble with his boss.

Albert Parsons

Lucy Parsons

As high-rises start to mushroom across Chicago to rival New York, they must appear to outsiders the pinnacle of the city’s triumphant rebirth from the ashes of 1871. But such adulation of conspicuous wealth disgusts Parsons to whom it is but a hollow victory paid for by the sweat and tears of workingmen whose living conditions continue to be driven into the ground.

Chicago after the 1871 Great Fire
Attributed to George N. Barnard (1819 - 1902)

It was because of the Great Fire that Parsons became interested in the labor question. In 1874, when workingmen complained that the Relief and Aid Society refused to help them despite the donations coming from around the world, claiming that they were themselves to blame for their own poverty.

Certainly, the folks who control the Society think they have better understanding of poverty. They do not work 10-13 hours a day six days a week in coal mines, steel mills, railroads, slaughterhouses, and in other dangerous occupations with no protection or remedy if they get hurt or sick on the job. Their mothers and wives do not work in a large, crowded, noisy room of deplorable conditions from dawn to late evenings without time to eat or go to bathroom. Their children, as young as three years old, do not have to run machines that may maim them for the rest of their lives. They do not count among their rank the tens of thousands killed by work accidents every year. All they care to count is the profits made off the back of natives and millions of migrant who arrived on this shore with a dream for the land of opportunities but found themselves in an American nightmare. 

They blame the costs and debts of reconstruction for the Panic of 1873, but Parsons knew better. It was the unmitigated greed of these same people that brought a decade of economic depression to the whole country. For years, these robber barons had made millions out of railroad constructions and speculations. And when Jay Cooke & Company went bankrupt over the failed plan to build a second transcontinental railway, bringing down with it many banks and thousands of businesses, it’s workers who have to pay the price with wage cuts, unemployment and endless hardships.

Unemployed men queuing for a meal at New York City Poorhouse after the Panic of 1873

So who should be blamed for the Great Railroad Strike four years later? Is it justified that rail workers across the country went out on strike in response to repeated pay cuts, only to be joined by others who had been suffering in silence for years? Rather than compromise, the capitalist attempted to break the strike by calling in scabs and militias, causing rioting and wide-scale destruction in many cities.

Destruction of the Union Depot, Pittsburgh during the Great Railroad StrikeM.B. Leiser, engraver / Public domain

During that Great Railroad Strike, Parsons witnessed in Chicago thousands of strikers clubbed and fired upon and dispersed by the police and militia, and another day several thousand men, women and children – none of whom on a strike –fired upon and several were killed. It was also during that summer of 1877 that Parsons came face to face with “the power that be” – being threatened against his life at gunpoint after he was thought a strike leader.

In the end, the rich snatched the victory by calling in the National Guard and the federal troops. Fearful of a revolution, capitalists from New York to Chicago pitched in millions to build armories and arm local Guard units to fight, not foreign enemies, but workingmen who they exploit like an aristocrat lording over their serfdom or a monarch over her colonial subjects.

Maryland National Guard's Sixth Regiment shooting strikers in Baltimore, 20 July 1877.

Such blatant contempt by the rich should shatter the shiny surface of this Gilded Age to reveal its rotten core to anyone. Parsons reviles Northerners with a sense of superiority over Southerners like him, but the abuses heaped upon these poor people by the organs of the rich are no different from the actions by southern slave holders toward the newly enfranchised slaves.

It puzzles him how some former abolitionists fail to see the parallel and, influenced by Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” pseudo-scientific slogan, became blind disciples to the laissez-faire dogma. His blood boils when remembering how the disgraced Henry Beecher preached against the strikers whose wages had been cut that "Man cannot live by bread alone but the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live," or "If you are being reduced, go down boldly into poverty". How many more people will be fooled by him and the likes of William Sumner?

It’s obvious that the republic that Lincoln fought for has been railroaded by a capitalistic oligarchy cozily in bed with elected politicians. With several men with Railroad connections appointed to the cabinet by one president after another, it should surprise absolutely nobody when the Railway Review announced that “No legislative body would dare to inaugurate or carry out any measure without first knowing the pleasure of the manufacturing and commercial interests,” or when the Railway World told the government to crush strikers virtually and actually as wicked and wanton as the French did to the Paris Commune

Parsons finds it impossible to disagree when workingmen say, “Poverty has no votes as against wealth, because if a man’s bread is controlled by another, that other can and, when necessary, will control his vote also.” He now feels that the chief function of all government is to maintain economic subjugation of the man of labor to capital – the monopolize of the means of labor. Money controls, by hook or crook, labor at the polls as in the factory.

That’s why he withdrew from all political participation including the Socialist Labor Party that he had been heavily involved. Political means will never yield justice. Formerly the master selected the slave. Today the slave selects his master. Nothing really changed. He became convinced of the hopelessness of political reformation, along with many workingmen who have lost their faith in the potency of the ballot of the law to protect the poor when the Supreme Court decided that the State legislature had a constitutional right to disarm workingmen who acquired weapons to protect themselves from capitalist brutality.

Parsons decides that it’s time to make enemies. His enemies in the southern states were those who oppress the black slave like his Aunt Easter – the house-servant who practically raised him as a child with great kindness and a mother’s love. Now his enemies in the north are those who perpetuate the slavery of the wage workers.

The capitalists can have any law passed in their favor — even the income and inheritance taxes abolished – but workingmen have nobody’s sympathy. The eight-hour day law remains as toothless today as the day it was passed already sixteen years ago.

The more he thinks about it, the clearer it is to him that the long work hours and low wages that workers are subjected to amount to their practical disenfranchisement as voters. They are deprived of the necessary time and means to organize for political action to abolish class legislation. He believes that the ballot box cannot be an index of the popular will until the debasing, impoverishing and enslaving industrial conditions are first altered.

This has to be the first step. So, although a loyal member of the more powerful Knights of Labor, Parsons makes up his mind to throw his full support to the rival Federation's initiative to make eight-hour day reality before May 1, 1886 — exactly two years from today. When achieved, workers will then have time to become better organized and demand equitable wealth distributions between labor and capital.

Uriah Stephens founded the Knights of Labor, the first national industrial union in the United States, in Philadelphia in December 1869 and led the organization until he resigned his post as Grand Master Workman in 1879. In this 1886 Kurz & Allison lithograph (seen in full in the media gallery), Stephens is honored as the “Founder of the Knights of Labor.”

No longer will we quietly have it harped in our ears that we are free and equal. That every avenue is open alike to all and all can climb to the top. The road to wealth is open alike to all. That’s just the sophistry the rich are continually giving to the poor to arouse their hopes and make them contented with their downtrodden condition. It is intended solely to quiet those underneath, so those on top will enjoy more safety and quiet while standing on them.

Parsons knows the numbers by heart. It is calculated in the article “The Owners of the United States” that based on the 1880 census that 250,000 people owns 75-80% of the country’s wealth. The census also shows that after deducting the cost of raw material, interest, rents, risks, etc., the propertied class – accounting for only 1/10 of the population -- have stolen more than 5/8 of all products, leaving scarcely 3/8 to the producers whose wages are never raised above the margin necessary for keeping intact their working ability.

This also results in overproductions which lead to panics and economic crashes. Under this system, periodic panics occur, worldwide in their character, growing more frequent and intense as the system develops. At such times, society is suddenly thrown back into barbarism. Thousands perish of want while surrounded with the greatest abundance. As production increases, wage decrease. Meanwhile, the workers become poorer and driven to crime, vagabondage, prostitution, suicide, starvation and general depravity. Poverty, crime, insanity and suicide has increased 400% in proportion to population in the last thirty years.

The same condition exists throughout Europe as in America. And every capitalist country, like hungry leeches, searches for new markets and colonies to extract fresh resources and dump their overproduction. This is the so-called “civilization”.

Therefore, the decisive combat of the proletarians against their oppressors – the bourgeoises of capitalistic society – must be simultaneous everywhere because class knows no border. The capitalists enjoy an endless supply of cheap labor by pitching white against blacks, natives against immigrants, Protestants against Catholics, one country origin against another, and everyone else against Chinese workers. Divide and rule is effective for capitalists as colonizers. The international fraternity of people as expressed in the International Working People’s Association is self-evident. 

This unjust, insane and murderous system must be destroyed by all means. This modern industrial system with its worldwide markets based on the institution of private property. The private ownership by a few members of society of the means of production and resources of life.

Every man has a natural ambition and a natural right to climb, but he has no right to climb at another man’s expense. One man has no right to live on the profits of another man’s labor, under any excuse whatever. He who stands on what another man produces, stands on that man. No matter what the pretext, he is standing on him wrongfully. The under man should knock off the burden and not be longer bamboozled with the idea that he should be patient, for perhaps by and by he may be on top. 

The idea that no man can get all the luxuries of this world without standing on the necks of other men is too ill-founded to be longer sustained. When they find his fellow man an explosive footstool, they will stop trying to use him for a footstool to boost himself up with. Gunpowder brought the world some liberty and dynamite will bring the world as much more as it is stronger than gunpowder. No man has a right to boost himself by even treading on another’s toes. Dynamite will produce equality. 

Parsons does not advocate the use of force, but he will loudly denounce the capitalist for employing it to hold laborers in subjection to them, and declare that such treatment would of necessity drive the working men to employ the same means in self-defense. They must be prepared to meet force with force.

As in former times a privileged class never surrendered its tyranny, neither can the capitalists of this age be expected to give up their rulership without being forced to do it. Therefore, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeois will be of a violent revolutionary character.

The Declaration of Independence says, “… But when the long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce the people under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such Government and provide new guards for their future security.”

This thought of Thomas Jefferson was the justification for armed resistance by our forefathers which gave birth to our Republic. Does it not also speak of the exploitation by the capitalists that workingmen are subjected to in our present time? Does it not compel us to reassert their declaration? Our forefathers have not only told us that against despots, force is justifiable, because it is the only means, but they themselves have set the example...

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