Reconstruction and the Gilded Age 183That explanation hardly satisfied the electorate, who showed their
displeasure by voting Democrats back into office. The Democrats now
held a majority in the House of Representatives, although the Senate
remained under Republican control because of the many holdovers
who were not up for reelection. The unpopularity of the McKinley
Tariff was especially significant in understanding the size of the Re-
publican defeat. Indeed, McKinley himself lost his bid for reelection
in 1890.
The bi t t e r n e ss m a n y Americans felt about the direction of the
country was reflected in a number of violent incidents that occurred
within a few years. For example, the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago
in May 1886 occurred when agitation over conditions of labor in the
city ended in clashes with the police that resulted in the hanging of
four anarchist labor leaders. This episode was followed by a violent
strike at the Carnegie steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in July
1892 ; and by an equally violent strike in Illinois in 1894 , called when
George Pullman, the inventor of the Pullman railroad car, discharged
one-third of his workforce and cut salaries. It took the intervention of
federal forces to bring the violence and these strikes to an end. Obvi-
ously, the growing economic distress among the laboring poor had in-
creased to the point where they resorted to violence as the only way to
make the nation and the government aware of the terrible conditions
that existed, especially in the cities. Labor unions such as the Ameri-
can Federation of Labor organized many of these outbursts to publicize
the wretched working conditions in industry.
Agriculture, too, suffered an economic turndown in the 1890 s, and
farmers recognized that their concerns mirrored the problems of labor
and that they needed to unite to get them resolved. Representatives
from the farmers’ alliances met in St. Louis in December 1889 with
leaders of the labor unions and the Granger and Greenback organiza-
tions, to form the People’s Party, better known as the Populist Party.
This party held its first national nominating convention in Omaha,
Nebraska, in July 1892 , with such leaders as Ignatius Donnelly, “Sock-
less Jerry” Simpson, Mary Elizabeth Lease, and Senator James Kyle of
South Dakota in attendance. They nominated James Weaver of Iowa