LABOR AND THE REPUBLIC ★^641The labor movement launched a sustained assault on the understanding
of freedom grounded in Social Darwinism and liberty of contract. Because of
unrestrained economic growth and political corruption, the Knights charged,
ordinary Americans had lost control of their economic livelihoods and their
own government. Reaching back across the divide of the Civil War, labor
defined employers as a new “slave power.” Concentrated capital, warned
George E. McNeill, a shoemaker and factory worker who became one of the
movement’s most eloquent writers, was now “a greater power than that of
the state.” “Extremes of wealth and poverty,” he warned, threatened the very
existence of democratic government. The remedy was to “engraft republican
principles into our industrial system” by guaranteeing a basic set of economic
rights for all Americans.
Labor raised the question whether meaningful freedom could exist in a sit-
uation of extreme economic inequality. On July 4, 1886, the Federated Trades of
the Pacific Coast rewrote the Declaration of Independence. Workers, the new
Declaration claimed, had been subjected not to oppressive government but to
“the unjust domination of a special class.” It went on to list among mankind’s
inalienable rights, “Life and the means of living, Liberty and the conditions
essential to liberty.”
Middle- Class Reformers
Dissatisfaction with social conditions in the Gilded Age extended well beyond
aggrieved workers. Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan in the late
1880s spoke of a “deep feeling of unease,” a widespread fear that the country
“was in real danger of another kind of slavery that would result from the aggre-
gation of capital in the hands of a few individuals.” Alarmed by fear of class
warfare and the growing power of concentrated capital, social thinkers offered
numerous plans for change. In the last quarter of the century, more than 150
utopian or cataclysmic novels appeared, predicting that social conflict would
end either in a new, harmonious social order or in total catastrophe. One pop-
ular novel of the era, Caesar’s Column (1891) by Ignatius Donnelly, ended with
civilized society destroyed in a savage civil war between labor and capital.
Of the many books proposing more optimistic remedies for the unequal
distribution of wealth, the most popular were Progress and Poverty (1879) by
Henry George, The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) by Laurence Gronlund,
and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). All three were among the
century’s greatest best- sellers, their extraordinary success testifying to what
George called “a wide- spread consciousness... that there is something radi-
cally wrong in the present social organization.” All three writers, though in very
different ways, sought to reclaim an imagined golden age of social harmony
and American freedom.
How did reformers of the period approach the problems of an industrial society?