A nation of immigrants

“I regard my people as I regard my machinery. So long as they do my work for what I choose to pay them, I keep them, getting out of them all I can. What they do or hoe they fare outside my walls I don’t know, nor do I consider it my business to know. They must look out for themselves as I do for myself”

To the American worker, who hankered to be rid of the capitalist “boss,” a cooperative “self-bossing” had seemed almost as desirable as the self-employment of an independent individual- until he learned by experience how hateful cooperators may be to one another.

One of the most profitable opportunities open to authors was to write for the great juvenile public. The most spectacular exploit was that of Horatio Alger, Jr., who between 1867 and 1899 wrote 135 books for boys. His favorite formula of the poor but honest lad who raises by pluck and industry from rags to riches had universal appeal. According to one estimate the total sale of Alger books was about 17 million, but this can be little better than a guess. Even harder to estimate would be Alger’s influence on sharpening the acquisitive instincts of several generations of American boys.

In 1877, a year of violence in which a general strike threatened to halt national production, federal troops engaged railroad strikers in Baltimore. Score of people were killed and millions of dollars in property damaged.

Social-Revolutionary clubs made their appearance in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Chicago, composed of foreign-born workers who had belonged to the Socialist Labor Party or who had recently arrived from Germany. Eventually the new organizations were to federate and form the Revolutionary Socialist Party. This party’s platform, adopted at a convention in 1881, urged the organization of trade unions on “communistic” principles and asserted that aid should be given only to those unions which were “progressive” in character. The platform also denounced the ballot as “an invention of the bourgeoisie to fool the workers” and recommended independent political action only in order to prove to workers “the iniquity of our political institutions and the futility of seeking to reconstruct society through the ballot.” The chief weapons to be used in combating the capitalist system were “the armed organizations of workingmen who stand ready with the gun to resist encroachment upon their rights…”

Very few workers in American were full-fledged anarchists. In the main those who were influenced by the anarchist philosophy, were class-conscious, militant trade unionists, who had lost faith in the efficacy of the ballot as a result of the increasing use of troops and local police to crush strikes, the widespread corruption in politics, and the inability even to seat labor candidates when they were elected to office.

“I want to tell you Socialists, that I have studied your philosophy, read your works upon economics, and not the meanest of them; studied your standard works, both in English and in German- have not only read but studied them. I have heard your orators and watched the work of your movement the world over. I have kept close watch upon your doctrines for thirty years; have been closely associated with many of you, and know what you think and what you propose. I know, too, what you have up your sleeve. And I want to say that I am entirely at variance with your philosophy. I declare to you, I am not only in variance with your doctrines, but with your philosophy. Economically, you are unsound; socially, you are wrong; and industrially you are an impossibility.”

It is idle to talk of a peaceable strike. None such has ever occurred. All combinations to interfere with perfect freedom in the proper management and control of one’s lawful business, to dictate the terms upon which such business shall be conducted by means of threats, are within the condemnation of the law.

“Old-stock Americans often thought that others were strange, inferior, and potentially disloyal… Rapid social and economic changes in American society after the Civil War reinforced intolerance. In the 1890s American nativists began noting with alarm the shifting patterns of immigration that brought so many Jews and Catholics from southern and eastern Europe. Labor violence, such as that occurring during the railroad disturbances of 1877 and at the Haymarket in Chicago in 1886, crowded slums in the nation’s fast-growing cities, and industrial strikes also created uneasiness about the stability of American society. Nativists were quick to blame foreign radicals and agitators for the unrest…