LABOR AND THE REPUBLIC ★^639In a 1905 case that became almost as notorious as Dred Scott and gave the
name “Lochnerism” to the entire body of liberty of contract decisions, the
Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York voided a state law establishing ten hours
per day or sixty per week as the maximum hours of work for bakers. The law,
wrote Associate Justice Rufus Peckham for the 5-4 majority, “interfered with
the right of contract between employer and employee” and therefore infringed
upon individual freedom. By this time, the Court was invoking “liberty” in
ways that could easily seem absurd. In one case, it overturned as a violation
of “personal liberty” a Kansas law prohibiting “ yellow- dog” contracts, which
made nonmembership in a union a condition of employment. In another, it
struck down state laws requiring payment of coal miners in money rather than
paper usable only at company- owned stores. Workers, observed mine union
leader John P. Mitchell, could not but feel that “they are being guaranteed the
liberties they do not want and denied the liberty that is of real value to them.”
LABOR AND THE REPUBLIC
“The Overwhelming Labor Question”
As Mitchell’s remark suggests, public debate in the late nineteenth century
more than at almost any other moment in American history divided along class
lines. The shift from the slavery controversy to what one politician called “the
overwhelming labor question” was dramatically illustrated in 1877, the year
of both the end of Reconstruction and the first national labor walkout— the
Great Railroad Strike. When workers protesting a pay cut paralyzed rail traffic
in much of the country, militia units tried to force them back to work. After
troops fired on strikers in Pittsburgh, killing twenty people, workers responded
by burning the city’s railroad yards, destroying millions of dollars in property.
General strikes paralyzed Chicago and St. Louis. The strike revealed both a
strong sense of solidarity among workers and the close ties between the Repub-
lican Party and the new class of industrialists. President Rutherford B. Hayes,
who a few months earlier had ordered federal troops in the South to end their
involvement in local politics, ordered the army into the North. The workers,
the president wrote in his diary, were “put down by force.”
“The days are over,” declared the New York Times, “in which this country
could rejoice in its freedom from the elements of social strife which have long
abounded in the old countries.” In the aftermath of 1877, the federal government
constructed armories in major cities to ensure that troops would be on hand in
the event of further labor difficulties. Henceforth, national power would be used
not to protect beleaguered former slaves, but to guarantee the rights of property.
How did reformers of the period approach the problems of an industrial society?