[clip] When her story shifts from the 1840 utopians to the conspicuous consumers of the Gilded Age, a more plausible explanation emerges for the outburst of radicalism that would affect American politics far into the present century. It is this: "The moneyed interests"—Justice Holmes's delicate term for capitalists who had triumphed in the Civil War—behaved with such selfishness, such arrogance, such brutality, and such contempt for the new industrial workforce that uprisings were inevitable. When they occurred, workers invariably found their causes crushed by the new monarchs of coal, steel, rails, and oil working in alliance with every arm of government. The president might order the army to intervene in a strike. Restoring order was the usual justification, but the order to be restored was always the order of "the moneyed interests."
Governors provided National Guard units for strikebreaking duty, sometimes only after the struck company agreed to pay the bill. Courts genially issued orders for workers to stop misbehaving and genially fined or imprisoned those who didn't obey. Even God was on the side of big money. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher told his well-heeled flock: "God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little. No equalization process can ever take place until men are made equal as productive forces. It is a wild vision, not a practicable theory."
Big money's arrogance was eloquently expressed in Henry C. Frick's comment after the bloody crushing of the Homestead steel strike in 1892: "We had to teach our employees a lesson and we taught them one they will never forget." The judge advocate of the Colorado National Guard, called to break up a mining strike in 1902, dismissed questions about the constitutionality of his mission: "To hell with the Constitution; we are not following the Constitution!" When the union filed habeas corpus pleas for release of its members, the commander of the Guard units said, "Habeas corpus be damned, we'll give 'em post mortems!"
This was the time of Vernon Louis Parrington's "great barbecue," when sympathetic politicians parceled out the nation's wealth in a "splendid feast...Gargantuan in its rough plenty." Rich and poor did not fare equally well at the table, however. The Homestead Act, to be sure, gave the homesteader 160 acres of land at $1.25 per acre, but the Union Pacific land grant gave its promoters an entire empire for nothing.
In the decades that followed, Parrington wrote, "there was to be no bargaining with corporations for the use of what the public gave; they took what they wanted and no impertinent questions were asked."
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In _The Rise of American Civilization_, their classic 1927 survey of American history, Charles and Mary Beard treat the excesses of the age as a historical inevitability. The pattern of rich businessmen overpowering agricultural societies could be traced from the most ancient of times up through the imperial Romans to the triumph of the French and English business class over their landed aristocracies. Where Young sees a villainous industrial despotism in the new age, the Beards see a familiar story of aggressive men, akin in spirit to military captains of the past, working their way up from the ranks, exploiting natural resources without restraint, waging economic war on one another, entering into combinations, making immense fortunes, and then, like successful feudal chieftains or medieval merchants, branching out as patrons of learning, divinity, and charity.
Young's view is not so measured. She insists repeatedly that the most important result of the Civil War was to split the country into two houses: "the house of the few rich and the house of the many poor with the abyss widening between them." She is fond of hissing villains and has a long list of them. The abuse with which she heaps them, if sometimes unfair, expresses a loathing so passionate that it is exhilarating to read in these days of bland and bloodless political writing. What we have here is good old-fashioned radical bile directed at what Harry Truman used to call "the special interests." Nowadays, when political discourse is limited to exalting material excess and the acquisitive instinct, it is as startling as a cold shower in January.
Young's roll of villains is not limited to the usual suspects like Frick, Gould, Pullman, Fisk, Harriman, and Presidents Hayes, Harrison, and Cleveland. Among its surprises we find John Hay, for instance, once Lincoln's secretary. She despises him for, among other things, living on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland. It was a street populated with
<quote> American despots who lived in an atmosphere of Medici magnificence, the coal and iron and steel and oil barons... [who] were undergoing or had already undergone the aurification which permitted them to wield unholy powers over the lives and deaths of poor men, but which did not arouse the outraged moral disapproval of Old Dirty Socks Abe Lincoln's former secretary.... <endquote>
There are eighty words still to come in this sentence, but no clue whether "Old Dirty Socks" is Hay or Lincoln. She is merciless on Lincoln's son Robert, partly because she thinks he treated his widowed mother badly, partly because of legal services he performed for George Pullman, the sleeping-car tycoon. "The Prince of Nails," as she calls the Emancipator's son, "would drive the nails into his possibly mad and possibly sane mother's already broken heart and would be the lawyer for...the despot Pullman and would drive the nails into Debs's heart and crucify his labor union as surely as if he were nailing it up on a mound of burning cinders in a railroad yard."
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It is Allan Pinkerton, however, who fascinates her. She spends eighty or ninety pages on Pinkerton, his sons, the Pinkerton detective James McParlan, and the Molly Maguires who terrorized the Pennsylvania anthracite fields. McParlan made the legal case that finally sent thirty men to the gallows. Whether they were the men who had actually committed the specific crimes attributed to the Molly Maguires was not entirely certain, but the court was not so interested in certainty as it was in crushing a threat to the safety and success of the mine owners.
This is a terrible and gripping story, and Young tells it well. Pinkerton, who created a private police force to serve American industry, had been a radical Chartist agitator in Scotland and fled Glasgow with a price on his head. In Chicago he underwent transformation from refugee political radical to America's most effective, most feared, and most hated "detective." An "antilabor detective," Young calls him, not unjustly.
The Molly Maguires were a secretive, closed society of Irish immigrants who, as Young tells it, had come to Pennsylvania's anthracite region before the Civil War "in search of survival." They had been embittered by the Civil War draft law, she writes, when they were "dragged from the coal pits and tied hand and foot, slung like corpses over horses or tied by ropes and dragged along the ground to the draft headquarters for shipment to the southern battlefields."
Most Irish immigrants of their time had fled to America to escape starvation and the tyranny of absentee English landlords. They had no enthusiasm for being pressed into the Union Army to face death for a cause that was utterly meaningless to them. It was especially galling to learn that people with money could buy their way out of the war by paying substitutes to fill their uniforms. To a newly arrived immigrant it looked like a war in which the stay-at-home rich profited from the death of the poor.
And so the Irish miners in Pennsylvania after the war lacked a sense of piety toward American justice. These were men whose people for generations had waged a silent guerrilla warfare against English landlords, and they brought this history with them to Pennsylvania. When wages fell as coal profits rose, sullen resentment developed into an outraged sense of injustice, then into fury, then into acts of desperation. Murders and violent assaults began to occur.
Suspicion fell on the secretive Molly Maguires. The mine owners retained Pinkerton; Pinkerton's man McParlan infiltrated the Irish community and came out with evidence to take to court. Convictions came easily. Twenty men were hanged after the first trial, ten more during the next two years. Thanks to Pinkerton and McParlan, the mine owners had brought the ultimate peace to the anthracite fields.
Young's account of all this concedes that the Molly Maguires engaged in "the assassination of repressive railroad barons and railroad owners and coal-mine barons and their sycophantic bosses." But had McParlan's detective work uncovered the real killers? She gives an emphatic no. The men the state hanged were "sacrificial scapegoats" and their execution "the archetypal crime of capital against labor," she asserts without, alas, citing evidence.
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In Young's turmoil of expressionistic history, we often lose sight of Eugene Debs. His parents were Alsatian French. His father, well educated and fond of literature, named him Eugene Victor after his favorite writers, the novelists Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo.
Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855, where his parents ran a small grocery. He was bright in school but quit at age fourteen to work on the railroad. It was 1870, Grant was president, and the heroic age of the railroad had just begun. Debs never lost his love of it. He began as a helper in the paint shop, then became a locomotive fireman, working up in the cab with the engineer, feeding coal into the boiler. Could he truly have read Plato's _Republic_ while keeping a locomotive boiler fired? Young says he did.
Losing his job in the depression of the 1870s, he found work in St. Louis, where he was shocked to find that "the rich danced under twelve hundred tons of crystal chandeliers in halls of gold-framed mirrors and the poor lived in hog hovels." Back in Indiana, he worked as a billing clerk in a grocery warehouse, but love of railroading drew him to the freight yards in his idle hours. There he fell in with Joshua Leach, who was recruiting members for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. Debs enlisted, impressed Leach, and at age twenty-three became editor of _The Locomotive Firemen's Magazine_.
Railroading was dangerous work. Dreadful wrecks happened with appalling regularity. Railroad men were scalded to death by steam, crushed when locomotives fell through poorly built bridges, and mutilated when badly laid track flew apart and sent trains tumbling down embankments. Debs filled the magazine with stories of railroaders killed and crippled; he became interested in politics and discovered he had a talent for it. He made his first speech at age twenty-three. He was city clerk of Terre Haute before he was thirty and went on to serve a term in the state legislature. There, after his proposals for women's suffrage and railroad safety legislation were overwhelmingly beaten, he concluded that no significant reforms could be achieved by conventional politics. Late in life, having gone twice to prison, he remarked that he had once "permitted myself to be elected to a state legislature" and was "as much ashamed of that as I am of having gone to jail."
Young's history doesn't reach his mature years, in which he became a charismatic leader of the union movement, created the powerful American Railway Union, and saw it busted when he, foolishly perhaps, let it be drawn into the Pullman strike of 1894. With the help of President Cleveland, the railroad owners obtained a court injunction which essentially ordered the strike to cease. The ARU leaders voted to ignore the order. Debs was arrested, tried for contempt of court without a jury, convicted, and sentenced to six months in prison. His union was destroyed.
Seeing labor crushed by a government in alliance with business, Debs moved toward socialism, saying, "I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough." As the presidential candidate of his new Social Democratic Party, Debs polled 96,000 votes in 1900. In 1904, his vote rose to 402,000. Socialism that year called for minimum wages, a maximum on work hours, women's suffrage, and abolition of child labor. Though these issues have long since been appropriated by the major parties and enacted, they were the very essence of crackpot, possibly dangerous radicalism in 1904.
In 1912 Debs polled 901,000 votes, 6 percent of the national total in an election that also had William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt on the ballot.
Opposition to the first World War brought him afoul of Wilson, who had once been the champion of peace, but who by 1917 was in war mode, as modern political lingo might phrase it. Under Wilson's stewardship, a patriotic hysteria was being created in support of a war to make the world safe for democracy. The Espionage Act was interpreted to mean that opposing the war was criminal, and Debs opposed it openly as an instrument that would enrich "the master class" at the expense of "the subject class."
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles," he said. "The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose." He was promptly charged with violating the Espionage Act, sentenced to ten years in prison, and sent to the maximum security penitentiary in Atlanta. A sentence to Atlanta was hard time, and Debs served three years of it. By 1920 he was frail and ailing. Wilson's attorney general, fearing it would embarrass the government if Debs died in prison, advised Wilson to set him free.
Debs seems to have had a remarkable sweetness of character that made people love him, but Wilson was not easily seduced. Wilson was a man of high principle. He rejected clemency, saying, "This man was a traitor to his country and will never be pardoned during my administration." The sentence was commuted by Warren Harding in 1921 after his attorney general, Harry Daugherty, having interviewed Debs, told Clarence Darrow, "I never met a man I liked better."
It is hard to explain the affection so many felt for Eugene Debs. Nowadays we take it for granted that a lovable politician is a fraudulent creation of public relations artists and ghost writers. Debs, though, was the genuine article. James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Wordsworth, tried to explain it in verse:
And there's Gene Debs—a man 'at stands And jes' holds out in his two hands As warm a heart as ever beat Betwixt here and the Jedgement Seat!
In U.S.A., John Dos Passos etched a memorable portrait of Debs titled "Lover of Mankind":
He was a tall shamblefooted man, had a sort of gusty rhetoric that set on fire the railroad workers in their pine-boarded halls made them want the world he wanted, a world brothers might own where everybody would split even...
---------------------------- Anyone see the film _Molly Maguires_ staring Sean Connery and Richard Harris? There was (is?) a metal band by the same name from St. Louis who did Lollapalooza '97.
here's a piece on Greenspan in the same issue of the New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?19991007035R