Labor Exploitation in the Long Nineteenth Century

America in the nineteenth century, saw the streamline of human labor, along with a growing dependency on machinery, into mechanisms for untold forms of wealth consolidation. From the moment a person’s hand touched a sapling, to its transformation into the caloric energy needed to feed the new sprawling energetic industrial metropolises of a growing America. The lived experience of the average American laborer was slowly turning into that of a biological cog in a new era of vertical and horizontal enterprises. The marked transition from the localized agrarian economies of the 18th century, which favored localized artisanal production and intergenerational family owned farm ventures, eventual gave way to a national interconnected economy commodifying efficiency and mass production. This new economic era would place working class people, often landless, at the bottom of the economic ladder and into perpetual rat race against one another. These economics tensions would bring about a new series of ethical and biological considerations that began to shape the ways in which Americans interpreted class, labor, the involvement of government in the economy, and even the inherit value of capitalism in American society itself.

“Our issues and our economic issues are systemic. They are not an accident. They are the result of an economic system that enriches the few, an enormous amount, right out of the gate. ~ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The popularization of the American Dream in the cultural zeitgeist portrays an American history founded upon a system of meritocracy grounded in hard work, intelligence, and a stick-with-it attitude, but for those that happen to live through this romanticized era of manifest destiny, class mobility, and boundless opportunity did this notion stand true? (1) All too often, historical works on labor and the economics of the 19th century tend to tell a different story.American labor historian Seth Rockman presented a narrative where, “early republic capitalism thrived on its ability to exploit the labor of workers unable fully to claim the prerogatives of market freedom.” (2) Meritocracy, as it is so often portrayed American mythology, relies upon the notion of legal equals. However, found in the basis of marxist literature is the depiction of a scarcity mindset at the heart of capitalism. A mindset, as Rockman argues, that allows for those who purchase the labor of others the ability to emotionally, “economically, and physically coerce” their subordinates. (3) Thus, creating a system which is inherently unequal and not based on merit.

The networking and aggregation of industrial capital with minimal ethical oversight at the beginning of the 19th century created new systems of maximized potential, but surreptitiously created a system of interlocking class devisions. Just as the slave societies of the 18th and 19th century reinforced political and economic consolidation, so too did the new fields of industrialized farming and production. (4) Human labor, irregardless of skill, became a material commodity in the age of production. (5) In comparison to the work of a skilled craftsmen and their apprentice, in the 18th century, piece-work provided several forms of labor fluidity, both benefitting and hindering the power workers. Unskilled laborers could easily find work within city centers and thus could easily flow from city to city and industry to industry, but their dependency upon the machinery of their employer made it so they could never fully reap the benefits of their own production. As such, shop owners held an imbalance of power through which they could deploy the moment margins reduced or unionization occurred.

Capital classes have often relied upon a series of similar political arguments in order to defend their power position. Couched within the notions of laissez faire and classical liberalism, employers argued for the right to form contracts with their employees without the interference of government intervention. (6) All to often however, employers relied upon underhanded and coercive methods to create an imbalance of power in favor of their position. In the beginning of the century, in cities like Baltimore, employers would wield the labor of exploited black slave as a mechanism to lower average payroll costs and an atmosphere of in-house wage competition. (7) Similarly, favorability towards specific ethnic groups over another, would result in the same form of wage depression. (8) The weaponization of internal class divisions subsequently reduced chances of unionization of employees across ethnic and racial boundaries.

By the later half of the nineteenth century, the American labour movement began to develop. Earlier demonstrations were often short lived, where actions were only taken temporarily against local employers and job specific. However, after the success of the national abolition movement, post Civil War labour advocates began to look towards the federal government as the arbiter of great change.(9) With one stroke of the pen, the federal government could pass legislation that could collectively improve the lives of all workers across the nation. Growing national prospects and a rise in popular Marxist and socialist literature, provided the rhetorical ammunition needed for a growing sense of class consciousness.(10) Furthermore, with the aid of urban population density and a national telegraph network, labour organizers were able to establish an interconnected web of labour movements across the nation’s largest manufacturing metropolises. Now, when demonstrations or bedlam occurred in one city, the news could potentially reverberate throughout the nation and bring about a sense of class unity. (11)

However as time proceed and successes like the eight hour work day in Chicago in 1867 passed, labor activists were quickly confronted by a new level of push back.(12) In the subsequent decades, marches, protest, and strikes would often be met with violent pushback. Businesses owners began to hire and arm private forces to protect their properties and “scab” workers.(13) The police department of Chicago, with the aid of thousands of dollars from the richest man in the city, Marshall Field, bought cannons, a Gatling gun, rifles, and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition.(14) Chicago’s wealthy elite were directly buying the support of the police, and wielding it against those who sought to cut into their profit margins. The police, often with aid of the state militia, violently disbanded unions meetings and strikes regardless of legal authority, and relied upon levels of force up to and including senseless murder. (15)

The underhanded tactics against the lower classes and the synergistic relationship between government and industrialists wasn’t limited to the urban centers of the Midwest and East coast. In the rural cotton belts of central Texas, wealthy agro-industrialist relied upon a complex social and economic system designed to hinder class mobility and establish debt peonage.(16) This “agricultural ladder” created an imbalance of power between wealthy corporate cotton ranchers and a multi-tiered and multi-racial underclass made of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and farm hands. Historical legacy, provided a disproportionate level of whites access to the slightly more profitable position of tenant farming, while blacks and those of Mexican heritage were more likely to be sharecroppers or farm hands.(17) As the century wained, agro-corporations consolidated larger tracts of lands and advanced their cultivation processes through the introduction of new mechanical technologies. This economic scenario would eventually lead to an increase in the price of land while subsequently driving down the cost of cotton per acre. As a result, the odds of becoming a land owner, for even white tenant farmers, was dwindling.(18) Bankers and landlords would capitalize on this period of economic insecurity. Desperation, oral agreements, owner dictated books, and local judicial bodies captured by industry created yearly cycles where tenants and sharecroppers rarely recorded a profit.(19) As a result, ever poorer whites trickled down the agricultural ladder and became sharecroppers and subsequently and incorrectly blamed blacks and Mexicans for falling cotton prices and lower wages.

Labor research has often shown that exploitation and in-class fighting is predominantly a feature and not a bug of capitalism. The exploitation of human labor, buttressed by the scarcity mindset, has often modulated to meet the needs of capital. Hidden within the history of the American periphery, is the story of exploitation of Native Americans. The “other slavery” as historian Andrés Reséndez has described it, was a missing yet “defining aspect of North American societies.” (20) The study of the other slavery describes lengths in which people in society will go to in order to improve upon their economic position the the exploitation of a minority class. Indian enslavement ranged from the mining of gold in the Caribbean, to large scale industrial mining of precious metals in the New Mexico, and to the oddities of Mormon family farms in Utah.(21) Yet, even though millions of natives were enslaved throughout the centuries, most members of Washington and the American public did not know of its existence until after 1865 and the following decades.(22) Just as industrial capitalist in the East were able to shape their needs and rhetoric around the labor norms of the day. As indigenous peoples slowly became dependent upon American trade, just as urban wage laborers and rural tenant farmers were dependent upon their industrial cohorts. The peripheral nature of Indian occupation and their status as a lower class allowed for the same dynamics to manifest as Europeans and their American decedents slowly moved west.

As it has be shown, this system of interlocked dependency creates a power dynamic which allows for exploitation under the guise of success within the marketplace. The scarcity mindset, allows for those who are exploited to turn on those around them in contrast towards working towards a better future. While the Guilded Age would eventually give way towards the progressive era, labor histories of the 20th and 21st century appear to perpetuate these norms of exploitation. Millions of Americans still go to sleep hungry and live in an endless cycle of paycheck to paycheck. For myself, reading this literature makes me question the validity of this paradigm. Is this really the best capitalism can offer, or are there others solutions through which the masses can organize around and improve upon their position? I suppose, only history will tell.

(1) Rockman, Seth. Scraping by: wage labor, slavery, and survival in early Baltimore. JHU Press, 2009. Pg. 259

(2) Ibid., Pg. 8

(3) Ibid., Pg. 11

(4) Berlin, Ira. Many thousands gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Harvard University Press, 2009. Pg. 8,9

(5) Rockman, Seth. Scraping by: wage labor, slavery, and survival in early Baltimore. JHU Press, 2009. Pg. 39

(6) Ibid., Pg. 31

(7) Ibid., Pg. 170

(8)Ibid., Pg. 72

(9) Green, James. Death in the haymarket: A story of Chicago, the first labor movement and the bombing that divided gilded age America. Anchor, 2007. Pg. 33, 34

(10) Ibid., Pg. 50

(11) Ibid., Pg. 31

(12) Ibid., Pg. 25

(13) Ibid., Pg. 69–70

(14) Ibid., Pg. 80

(15) Ibid., Pg. 74–84

(16) Foley, Neil. The white scourge: Mexicans, blacks, and poor whites in Texas cotton culture. Vol. 2. Univ of California Press, 1998. Pg. 7

(17) Ibid., Pg. 66–68

(18) Ibid., 64, 65

(19) Ibid., Pg. 77, 84, 88

(20) Reséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Pg. 8, 9

(21) Ibid., Pg. 29, 212, 276–277

(22) Ibid., 298–299