parker lutz
There are many historians that might say that the government has done things to help stop and prevent the abuse of its people. This statement is true in a sense, however, it can be said that the government is the single greatest abuser and negligent actor in history. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century the government would, at best, be negligent in protecting the american people from abuse and, at worst, advocate for and participate in the abuse of the american people.
By the start of late 19th century a newly invigorated hatred against colored people developed in America that took the form of Jim Crow. This hatred had a number of results that inevitably change things forever. Prior to the Jim Crow era, although having been freed from slavery, former slaves were still in many ways enslaved due to the black codes, vagrancy laws, share cropping and a number of other abusive laws specifically written and passed in the former Confederate States in order to oppress blacks. This is one example of abuse by state and local government and negligence by the federal government which refused to protect blacks from this kind of abuse. Even though things for colored people were bad during Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow actually made things exponentially worse.
The support for Jim Crow and its hateful ideology came from a number of places in society. Many white members of the christian community, preachers, theologians, pastors, etc. considered them selves and theirs fellow whites as being superior to to blacks and colored people because they were gods chosen people and that blacks were cursed to be servants of whites. As a result of this hate filled new customs became common place. Two examples of Jim crow customs was that a black man could not offer his hand to a white woman because it implied intimacy and the black man could subsequently be accused of rape, and whites and blacks could not eat together and if they did a patrician had to separate the two.
Around this time state and local governments would start to pass laws making things like poll taxes imposed on blacks legal along with other laws that would restrict their rights to vote. To give context here, $2 in 1890 is equivalent to $52.63 in 2015 money. Mississippi in 1890 would later amend their constitution making all voters pay a $2 poll tax, meaning only wealthy men could vote. If one lost their receipt on their way to the polls they had to pay again. This poll tax made anyone, particularly black men venerable to muggings. There is another layer to this which is that any black man who went to vote could and most likely did get met with hostility by either the KKK, the city, the police (city, county, and state) or all three. This would represent another act of negligence by the federal government, and abuse by the county and state governments.
It wasn't long before forced segregation became a common place in state and local jurisdictions. The stated that as long as the two races were separate, but equal in their accommodations there was no violation of ones constitutional rights. Homer Plessey, a white man with one eighth african ancestry decided to challenge the law by engaging in civil disobedience and sitting in an all white train car where he was later arrested. Plessey’s lawyer argued that such laws violated his 5th 13th and 14th amendment rights, but unfortunately the supreme court ruled 8 to 1 against him. The ruling on the Plessey v. Ferguson case codified that segregation was ok to do in this country.
As a Voluntarist i find discrimination to be morally wrong and do not condone it, but in this country people have the right to be wrong. There are two kinds of segregation. Theres voluntary segregation by which a business owner voluntarily decides who they will buy from and sell too, and there is forced segregation by which the business owner is coerced under threat of violence used against them to deny service to paying customers.
As bad as discrimination and segregation is, it is within the rights of a property owner and business owner to deny service to a customer when that segregation is voluntary. On the other hand forced segregation is not within the rights of another because it limits the ability of parties to voluntarily enter into commerce with each other.
How does the voluntarist view point reflect the issues of the time period? First off, the railroad companies objected to the new segregation laws as they had to bare the expense of creating separate train cars for white and non-white passengers. The segregation laws created further problems because of segregated schools, which would later generate an uneducated or poorly educated populace of colored peoples. The result of uneducated or poorly educated colored people would further prove to be a problem because those who could not read or write could get conned by white. In addition to that critical thinking is a skill that i associate as being taught in schools. If you cant think critically you will have a harder time seeing that your not free. Uneducated or poorly educated colored people could expect to get low paying jobs because they lacked the knowledge to hold high stations of work. This is of no fault of their own, but rather such a situation was thrust upon them.
Private companies, free to associate with whom ever they chose would have been able to make more money had segregation not been imposed against them. Furthermore, privately owned schools free to admit and enroll students of whom ever they chose could have created higher percentages of literacy, and critical thinking. These schools, teaching whom ever they wished, would have also created more qualified applicants for employment which means that the best, most qualified person could have gotten a job. These employees would have generated more products or higher qualities of service, which in tern would have earned the company more money. We can see just with voluntary segregation that those who decided not to discriminate would have been better off, and a ripple effect would have gone outwards in all directions.
Roughly around the same time that jim crow started another new ideology started to take hold by the elites known as social darwinism. Although this ideology would be most harmful to the black and colored population of the united states, this ideology was also greatly harmful to poor and working class americans of all races. We see aspects of abuse and neglect from business owners and industrial tycoons and a failed attempt to stop such abuse and neglect by the federal government.
To understand Social Darwinism we need to understand la se faire economics. Le se faire is a french term which means let it be, or in other terms “hands off, government”. Le se faire is not bad by itself, but it can become bad, or be used to do bad things when one takes on an ideology that they are superior by virtue of their wealth, skin complication, or gender. There are two basic economic theories, one mentioned above (Le se Faire) and Kanesian economics.
The result of government non-intervention resulted in huge advances in industrialization and the growth of the american labor market, which had a lot of positive affects. But even though there were positive effects there still some negative ones as well, which took the form of monopolies. Men like J. D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan and many others started to corner their respective markets, making their goods more expensive and ruining their competition. As a result the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was written, passes the house and senate, and was signed in to law. The purpose of this Law was to go after the Corporations And Tycoons that were controlling the market by smashing their monopoly in to pieces and scattering them to the winds. Instead it was used to go after unions.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was basically useless because it had no teeth. The act didn't even target that which is in the name which is trusts. The supreme court would later rule in United States v E.C. Knight Company "that the result of the transaction was the creation of a monopoly in the manufacture of a necessary of life" but ruled that it "could not be suppressed under the provisions of the act”.
Even though there were monopolies and the government was negligent in keeping them from controlling the market, in a truly free society a monopoly would not be able to exist for very long, since innovation would result in a natural breakup of the monopoly. Furthermore, governments create more monopolies than they destroy by subsidizing businesses and corporations, thus making it impossible for non-subsidized companies to compete. A corporation is by its very nature a government created entity.
As the 1890’s started to unfold a labor movement started to emerge and take hold. Many american laborers were tired of being treated like cogs in a machine while their employers maintained a level of power over them. What emerged would usher in a 20 year period that would be called some historians and the labor wars.
Andrew Carnegie like many industrialists of the day were shrewd in their planing and execution of business dealings. By using vertical integration and owning the supply chain he was able to create and maintain a monopoly on steel in the US. This meant that he was able to undercut his competitors and thus force them out of business.
In 1883 Carnegie bought out his competitor homestead steel works. Working conditions in steel foundries could be argues as always being dangerous, but with the immense power that carnegie and his plant managers had there was very little that the workers could do to improve the safety of their working conditions or to get hazard pay. In addition to that the government would not get involved, and when they did they would always side with the company over the workers. In addition to that the workers got very little pay. The contracts for the homestead workers was set to expire and the wages of the workers needed to be settled, but this was something that Carnegie was not going to allow as he was vehemently against unions and collective bargaining agreements.
Carnegie was incredibly smart in that he could have the plant manager Fred Frick make a bad offer which in turn would aggravate the workers enough to want to strike. With a the offer having been made and the workers walking off the job, Frick set to work to build a 3 mile fence around the plant equipped with lookout platforms and topped with barbed wire. Fricks plan was simple. After having built the walls around the the plant, known by the workers as Fort Frick, he then contacted the Pinkertons Detective Agency. Agents, under the cover of darkness, would move in to secure a corridor necessary for getting scabs into the mill and continue the steel production.
The Pinkerton agents took a barge to the mill and tried to get in, but the picketers counted on this. Thousands of men and women from the town of homestead arrived to force the agents back. At some point a shot rung out and all out fighting began. The fighting would last 12 hours and the Pinkerton agents would finally surrender and be forced on a train out of town. This event would be looked at by many strikers as a victory, but all of them had been black listed, and to make matters worse an “anarchist” would later make a failed assassination attempt on management members of the plant.
With the public backlash that would occur and the strike funds waning many strikers went back to apply for their old jobs only to find that they were A) black listed and B) replaced by someone else. The strikers would be forced to give in and got their jobs back with wages less than what they were before the strike began.
Ten years after the Homestead Strike a strike in Pullman Illinois was about to get underway. Though there are some differences in the strike its self the result would later be about the same as would be the reasons that lead to the strike.
George Pullman, owner and creator of the Pullman Palace (Train Car) Company was a very smart industrialist. The Pullman Car was a luxurious sleeping car that the wealthy elite could stay in on journeys across the country. The pullman car was basically like the railroad equivalence of a stateroom on a cruise ship, or that of 1st class on a plane. These cars were not only built and owned by Pullman, but operated by Pullman associates on railways all across the country.
Pullman, being equally as shrewd as Carnegie, had the brilliant idea of building his own town for his workers to stay in. This meant that he could pay his employees, charge them for rent and other goods as services and all that money would go back into the pocket of Pullman. This practice from a practical business sense is very smart as you minimize costs while maximizing profit. This would not last forever though, as the economic tidal wave that was the panic of 1893 would later bring Pullman and his car company into one of the bloodiest labor disputes of the 1890’s.
In 1893 a financial panic started to race across the country affecting everyone it touched. The Pullman employees would be particularly hurt by this due to low wages that the were paid, but this was only the beginning of their problems. Pullman too, was affected by the panic and demand for the manufacturing and operating of Pullman cars had decreased significantly. To offset his losses, Pullman raised the rent that he would charge his employees and their families to live in the town while keeping the wages at their pre crash levels. This would usher in a walk off strike.
With a walk off strike ensuing, the workers reached out to the American Railroad Union. Eugene Debs, head of the ARU and a socialist would call on all his union workers to a general strike against Pullman Cars. The strike orders were issued in a few days and in June 18, 1894 the general strike began.
Very early on the protest went from peaceful to violent as workers started to set fire to train cars. Thousands of armed deputies and government agents arrived and arrested the workers. Court orders would later be signed making it illegal for the workers to protest. The strike against Pullman started to fail and it was only getting worse. When Grover Cleveland, then President of the US heard of the strike, he sent in federal troops to put down the protest and get the trains moving again.
Ultimately, the strike would fail. Eugene Debbs was arrested, tried and found guilty of violating a court injunction. Despite the failure here, the Pullman employees would play a larger part what would later bring about unionization.
By 1910 laborers across the US would finally gain some semblance of rights, but these rights would not come without a catastrophic tragedy that would ultimately shock and anger the public. This tragedy would be known as the Triangle fire and it would bring sweeping changes to labor practices.
In 1909, sweat shops were rampant across the New York especially in an area known as the Garment District. Laborers would work 14 hour days in dark, dingy conditions that were unsanitary. The air in these factories was unfiltered and unventilated and rodents lived and breaded on the factory floor. Although The Triangle Shirt Waist Co. had one the most modern factories in New York, its conditions were still terrible. Of the 2 exits that existed in case of an emergency, one of them was locked.
The women that worked for Triangle found these conditions to unacceptable and decided to go on strike. The strike started off the way many strikes in the late 19th century started, with scabs, strike breakers, and the police beating and injuring protesters. This protest would not have long, but word of the strike spread quickly and many other factories were shutting down due to strikes. On a night in 1909 it was decided to have an industry wide strike in New Yorks Garment District.
Nearly a year would pass and with the strike funds depleted, the women of The Triangle would be forced to go back to work. On march 5, 1910 a fire would break out. There were only 3 ways of escape from the flames. One means of escape was down the elevator. Another means was to go out the only unlocked door. The Third and final Means of escape was on toe the fire escape to the street below. The fire escape would pull away from the building after just 20 women stepped out onto it, dumping the women on it to fall to their deaths. The elevators could only carry so many people at a time, and once the weight capacity was reached one had to wait for the next elevator to arrive. At one point the elevator stopped coming and the women were now trapped. With no where to go many women either burned to death or jumped to their deaths. Ironically the very same police officers that were tasked with beating up protesters and breaking up the strike would be the same Police officers to scrape the dead bodies off the side walk, and many of them could not handle it.
Despite the fact that the owners were acquitted on all charges, some good came out of it as new laws were written and enacted. New laws required that all exits be unlocked/unblocked and that they be clearly labeled. Fire hoses, axes and other measures also had to be set in place.
The eventual victory that the labor movements had brought about the start of workers right, but what we see now is a result that may be worse than when those victories were won. Today, minimum wage is hurting everyone.
Employees are harmed by minimum wage because someone that has very few skills or experience will ultimately cost the business money. If ones productivity and labor produces $5 worth of products per hour and the business by law has to pay the employee $10 per hour the business is losing money and will have to lay off or fire that worker. This has a ripple effect as it hurts the other employees who are still working for the business and for the recently fired employee who now has to find a new job.
The workers who are still employed at the business now have to pick up the slack and work harder with a smaller crew. They may also have to deal with a new person who needs to get acclimated to the job, which will take valuable time trying to train him. The recently fired employee is now unemployed. with very few skills and little to no experience the unemployed person will now find it increasingly difficult to land a new job, because any business that hires him will lose money on that investment.
The business owner has plenty of problems on his end as well and they are all caused by minimum wage. The owner was losing money by employing someone who was being payed for $10 an hour for $5 an hour worth of productivity. Without minimum wage the owner could have kept the employee and adjusted his pay so that the company could break even, but because of minimum wage, he had to be let go. Now the owner it dealing with a smaller crew and he’s having trouble keeping up with demand.
Because business owners have to over pay their workers rather than pay them based on the the output of productivity of the worker, in order to break even on the tail end or even make the slightest profit, the business owner needs charge people more for the products than what the are actually worth. This undoubtably hurts the consumer. Clearly the negative impact that minimum wage has on Businesses hurts everybody.
From the abuses of Jim Crow to the negligence and abuse of social darwinism and the labor wars, government has been right in the middle of it. It is true and just as plain to say that we as a society have improved the lives of the everyday american, but the government has continued to cause us just as many problems as have been fixed. In conclusion, to quote Lysander spooner, “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”