Chapter 24: Industry Comes of Age 1865-1900

*FOR CLASS, WE ONLY HAD TO READ PART OF THIS CHAPTER, SO THE NOTES ARE ONLY FOR THE PART WE HAD TO READ.

The Impact of the New Industrial Revolution on America:

• Standard of living rose -> factories needed more labor and immigrants swarmed for jobs.
• Jeffersonian farming ideals out the window w/ manufacturing
• Learned to live on factory clock.
• New economic and social opportunities for women: typewriter and telelphone - worked out of necessity - paid less than men
• Oligarchy of money - (1900) 1/10 of people owned 9/10 of nation's wealth
• Dependece on wages
• Strong pressures for foreign trade

In Unions There is Strength:

• Factories were huge corporations - depersonalized
• New machines displaced employees
• More immigrants and unemployeds seeking jobs -> pay them less
• Corporations had much power to fight strikes.
• "Strike" seemed unpatriotic and socialistic.

Labor Limps Along:

• After Civil War, Unions developed
• National Labor Union (1866) - attracted 600,000 members (Colored National Labor Union also developed) => 8-hour workday.
• Wages lowered in 1877 -strike! - federal troops used to restore order.
• Knights of Labor (1869) - secret society until 1881 =>welcomed skilled, unskilled men, women, whites, blacks. Campaigned for safety and health codes, producer's cooperatives.
• Led by Terence V. Poowderly; striked for 8-hr workday, against Gould's Wabash Railroad (1885).

Unhorsing the Knighs of Labor:

• Chicago (center of Knights), Labor protests (May 4, 1886) police came, bomb dropped, anarchists arrested [Haymarket Square]
• Liberal John P. Altgeld became governer of Illinois - pardoned 3 surviving anarchists
• Demise of Knights caused by: Knights were wrongly associated with anarchists, skilled workers broke away and joined American Federation of Labor, Knights diffused

The AF of L to the Fore:

• American Federation of Labor - 1886 - Samuel Gompers (prez and founder)
• Federation of preexisting smaller labor unions -> demanded fairer share for labor, no problem w/ Capitalism, sought better wages, hours, and working conditions.
• Walkout and boycott.
• Labor Day - Congress 1894.