THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ★^611they were “captains of industry,” whose energy and vision pushed the economy
forward, or “robber barons,” who wielded power without any accountability in
an unregulated marketplace. Most rose from modest backgrounds and seemed
examples of how inventive genius and business sense enabled Americans to
seize opportunities for success. But their dictatorial attitudes, unscrupulous
methods, repressive labor policies, and exercise of power without any demo-
cratic control led to fears that they were undermining political and economic
freedom. Concentrated wealth degraded the political process, declared Henry
Demarest Lloyd in Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), an exposé of how
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company made a mockery of economic competition
and political democracy by manipulating the market and bribing legislators.
“Liberty and monopoly,” Lloyd concluded, “cannot live together.”
Workers’ Freedom in an Industrial Age
Remarkable as it was, the country’s economic growth distributed its benefits
very unevenly. For a minority of workers, the rapidly expanding industrial
system created new forms of freedom. In some industries, skilled workers
commanded high wages and exercised considerable control over the produc-
tion process. A worker’s economic independence now rested on technical skill
rather than ownership of one’s own shop and tools as in earlier times. What
was known as “the miner’s freedom” consisted of elaborate work rules that left
skilled underground workers free of managerial supervision on the job. Through
their union, skilled iron- and steelworkers fixed output quotas and controlled
the training of apprentices in the technique of iron rolling. These workers often
knew more about the details of production than their employers did.
Such “freedom,” however, applied only to a tiny portion of the industrial
labor force and had little bearing on the lives of the growing army of semi-
skilled workers who tended machines in the new factories. For most workers,
economic insecurity remained a basic fact of life. During the depressions of the
1870s and 1890s, millions of workers lost their jobs or were forced to accept
reductions of pay. The “tramp” became a familiar figure on the social landscape
as thousands of men took to the roads in search of work. Many industrial work-
ers labored sixty- hour weeks with no pensions, compensation for injuries, or
protections against unemployment. Although American workers received
higher wages than their counterparts in Europe, they also experienced more
dangerous working conditions. Between 1880 and 1900, an average of 35,000
workers perished each year in factory and mine accidents, the highest rate in
the industrial world.
Much of the working class remained desperately poor and to survive needed
income from all family members. In 1888, the Chicago Times published a series
What factors combined to make the United States a mature industrial
society after the Civil War?