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A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY
Unit 3: Reconstruction and UrbanizationPart 9: The End of an Era
THE HOMESTEAD STRIKE
• On the night of July 5, three hundred heavily armed Pinkerton men assembled on a barge downriver of the Homestead Steel Works in Pennsylvania and then proceeded upriver.
• The Pinkertons attempted to disembark at the mill and break the strike by force, but the strikers fended them off.
• By the afternoon of July 6, the strikers had been joined by enough supporters to number 5,000, easily overwhelming the Pinkertons despite their arms.
THE HOMESTEAD STRIKE
• The Pinkerton men asked to surrender to the strikers, but the strikers refused.
• At that point, the Governor of Pennsylvania sent in the state militia to support the Pinkertons and break the strike.
• On July 12, more than 4,000 armed soldiers surrounded the steel mill and broke the strike.
• The result was a devastating loss for organized labor and a win for Andrew Carnegie.
GROVER CLEVELAND
• In 1892, Grover Cleveland defeated Benjamin Harrison to return to the Presidency.
• When he took the oath of office in 1893, he became the only President to serve two terms that were not consecutive.
• Almost immediately upon his return to office, he faced a severe economic downturn known as the Panic of 1893.
• The Panic caused widespread labor unrest, which would be the focus of most of his term.
EUGENE V. DEBS
• Helped to establish the American Railway Union, the largest labor union of the late nineteenth century, in 1893.
• Unlike previous unions, the ARU’s policy was to incorporate all railway workers regardless of their particular jobs.
• Acquired union members in Chicago when the Pullman Palace Car Company cut workers’ wages by almost 30%, after the Panic of 1893 caused company revenue to fall.
THE PULLMAN STRIKE OF 1894
• In 1894, four thousand Pullman workers went on a ‘wildcat strike’ against the company. A ‘wildcat strike’ is a strike conducted without union authorization or leadership.
• Debs saw this as an opportunity to increase membership of the ARU. He traveled to the town of Pullman, Illinois, to enlist the strikers.
• Using the ARU’s interstate reach, Debs called for a boycott of any and all trains carrying Pullman cars.
THE PULLMAN STRIKE OF 1894
• With participation running across state lines, the boycott involved more than 250,000 railroad workers and essentially shut down all freight transport by rail west of Detroit.
• Grover Cleveland dispatched twelve thousand federal troops to Chicago, to enforce a court injunction demanding an end to the strike. He argued that the strike action violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, essentially defining unions as conspiratorial monopolies.
THE PULLMAN STRIKE OF 1894
• Debs was arrested on federal charges, particularly conspiracy to obstruct the mail.
• The strike was shut down on a city by city basis, with federal troops offering military support to local authorities who attempted to enforce the injunction to end the strike.
• During his time in prison, Debs read the works of Karl Marx.
• Upon release in 1895, Debs was an outspoken Socialist.
TAMMANY HALL V. THE BARONS
• Workers’ rights were threatened in New York as well, when a city committee attempted to break Tammany Hall’s grip on politics.
• Among others, J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt supported and financed an official investigation into Tammany’s mayoral candidate, ultimately forcing him out of an election.
• The result was the further political dominance of industrial barons in one of the largest manufacturing and freight transport centers in America.
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER
• Times were changing, and the man who breathed life into the mythology of the change was a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner.
• In 1893, at the Chicago World’s Fair, Turner delivered a public lecture in which he argued that “the American character” had been created by the possibility of self-reinvention and self-reliance on the unsettled, always expanding frontier.
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER
• Lamenting United States Census findings that the frontier was disappearing, Turner noted that increasing numbers of people were seeking their fortunes in cities rather than in the wilderness, and so he suggested that “the American character” was under threat.
• Essentially sharing Jefferson’s views of the yeoman farmer, Turner expressed nostalgia for a world in which self-reliant young men sought their fortunes by farming the West.
THE HAWAII DISPUTE
• Turner’s lecture was admired and expanded on by the President of the American Historical Association, Theodore Roosevelt.
• A sign that the continental frontier had closed, and that a new, international frontier had opened, appeared in January 1893 when a group of American sugar planters in Hawaii led a coup against Queen Liliuokalani and removed her from power.
• America started to treat foreign nations like Indian tribes...
A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY
Unit 3: Reconstruction and UrbanizationPart 9: The End of an Era
