Chapter 8 American Reform Movements and Social Change The Occupy Wall Street movement has publicized the problems of income inequality in contemporary America

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Chapter 8 American Reform Movements and Social Change The Occupy Wall Street movement has publicized the problems of income inequality in contemporary America. Daryl L/Shutterstock; Marcio Jose Bastos Silva/Shutterstock The last chapter defined social movements and explained their development from different perspectives. This chapter focuses more concretely on movements and their consequences for social change. This chapter and the next emphasize the distinction between reform and revolutionary movements that we made in the last chapter. Reform movements are collective action efforts that promote modest changes within the framework of existing social arrangements. Reform movements may focus on either broad or narrow social reforms. They produce significant change, but they do so in a gradual, piecemeal, and incremental way. And, as you will see, their successes are always limited and constrained by powerful forces that defend the stability of the existing social arrangements in society. By contrast, revolutionary movements are those that attempt relatively more radical and encompassing changes of the social system itself. This chapter has three goals: (1) to illustrate concretely some of the abstract explanations for the origins of movements that we discussed in the last chapter, (2) to describe some important American reform movements, and (3) to discuss in a more general way the kinds of social change that reform movements are likely to produce. The Social Context of TwentiethCentury American Reform Movements Broad social contexts and trends determine the kinds of movements that develop and their significance for change. Recall the discussion in the last chapter of Smelser’s emphasis on “structural conduciveness” as an important determinant of movement emergence, or the perceptions of threat described by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly. What structural contexts and trends were conducive to what kinds of reform movements in America in the twentieth century? Given those earlier discussions, what follows should sound familiar to you. At the beginning of the twentieth century, America was undergoing a transformation from a nation of farmers and small-town dwellers to a nation of urban workers and employees. Industrial technological innovation was dramatically increasing economic productivity. A growing system of mass production, distribution, and consumption was absorbing and transforming small-scale traditional economic life. Railroads linked urban centers, providing businesses with expanding markets for their products. While capitalist industrial growth produced more goods and services, mergers and buyouts among firms produced large and powerful corporations that attempted monopolistic control of producer markets in steel, machinery, oil, and railroads as well as consumer markets, such as food processing, leather goods, sugar, and rubber boots and gloves (Bernhard et al., 1991: 518–519). By the 1890s, the Carnegies exercised virtual control over the American steel industry (U.S. Steel), while the Rockefellers did the same for petroleum products (Standard Oil Company). In short, the dual economy that we discussed in Chapter 6 was emerging. Wealthy classes who owned and controlled large firms often had lifestyles involving such ostentatious displays of new wealth that Mark Twain satirically described the decade of the 1890s as the “Gilded Age.” The names of the families who built such firms are familiar to us still—the Rockefellers in oil, the Carnegies in steel, the DuPonts in chemicals, and the Morgans and Mellons in banking and finance. At the same time, wages and material standards of average families also rose significantly between 1860 and 1900. Immigrants seeking opportunity flooded into American port cities, satisfying the demand for labor, but also creating suspicion by their “un-American” behavior and culture and their willingness to work for wages lower than “real” Americans would accept (a pattern that is repeating itself now). In this period of general economic expansion, there were increasingly severe recessions and business slumps (in 1873–1879, 1884–1886, and 1893–1897). Translated into the lives of ordinary families and individuals, these economic “boom-and-bust” cycles meant a succession of finding opportunity, often losing it, uprooting, and moving. And through this period of disruptive progress and change, the symbols of American culture and identity rooted in the rural images of the American way of life were called into question by urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Late nineteenth-century government, which in retrospect seems permeated with corruption, was supportive of the interests of the industrialists, but otherwise was unable or unwilling to address the problems caused by these profound processes of economic and social transformation. Two things are important for you to understand about the kinds of social reform movements that emerged at the turn of the last century. First, a sizable minority of workers and many farmers bore the burdens and became the victims of change. Second, in spite of generally rising living standards, there was pervasive concern about the social problems connected with industrial capitalist expansion and political corruption of the era. Social Class and Reform Movements at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Important reform movements were rooted in conflicts and grievances related to social class. By social class we are here talking about people who share certain economic positions, interests, and problems. Three important class-based movements were related to the interests and problems of farmers (the agrarian Populist movement), workers (the labor movement), and educated professionals and intellectuals (the Progressive movement). Agrarian Populism Paralleling industrial growth, agricultural productivity grew enormously in the late nineteenth century. With agriculture increasingly mechanized and efficient, the growing availability of every form of food and fiber supported consumers in the mushrooming cities. But farming and ranching remained a precarious enterprise because of uncertainties in the weather and yearly market price fluctuations. Bad weather and a scanty crop could be ruinous, but an abundant harvest driving prices down could be almost as bad. Added to these perennial uncertainties, railroad transportation costs and bank loans (for land, seed, and equipment) often upset the delicate balance between farm income and expenses. And eastern moneylenders were notorious for charging high interest rates and demanding high collateral. Growing economic productivity in the late nineteenth century slowly made everything cheaper (and profits more precarious), but prices for agricultural goods dropped more drastically than prices for other goods. For example, between the 1870s and 1890s the market price of wheat and cotton (the mainstays of midwestern and southern farmers) dropped by 50 percent (Bernhard et al., 1991: 582). Hard times on the farm produced a widespread rural protest movement in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. In the Midwest, this protest took shape around state-level social movement organizations called the Patrons of Husbandry, or more popularly, the Grange. The targets of this protest were the banks, railroads, and merchants who sold implements, and all the middlemen who stood between the farmers and urban consumers. Granger political parties were organized in 11 states and in the 1870s controlled state legislatures in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. Granger legislation tried to reduce middleman prices by regulating the price of rail transportation and the price of grain elevator storage of crops, regulations that the Supreme Court shortly ruled unconstitutional. By the 1880s, state Grange organizations were diminishing as a political force, but popular farm alliances sprouted in the Southeast, Texas, and the Northwest. The master ideological frame of this protest movement depicted the nation as divided into the wicked and the good. The children of light were the “producers,” especially the tillers of the soil. The children of darkness were those who produced nothing, but grew fat as parasites on farmers and laborers. Most prominent were the financiers who conspired to reduce the money supply of the nation (. .. by insisting on gold backed dollars . . .) in order to push up the value of the dollars they lent to others. (Bernhard et al., 1991: 583) Farm alliance leaders tried to forge alliances with labor movement organizations in 1889, and a coalition of regional farm alliances created the People’s Party, or Populists, as they became known. In 1890, the Populists met in Omaha to select candidates for the 1892 election. In one of the most colorful and raucous political gatherings in the nation’s history, delegates adopted a platform that summed up the outlook of agrarian dissent: They advocated free and unlimited coinage of silver, a graduated income tax, government ownership of the railroads and the telephone and telegraph system, the secret ballot, direct election of U.S. senators, and restraints on immigration. To gain support from urban workers they passed resolutions supporting reduced working hours. While the Populists made the strongest third-party showing in American history, the 1892 election was still a disaster: They won 1 million of 17 million votes cast. They carried majorities in Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado (the center of the silver-mining industry) and made strong showings only in the wheat and beef states of the Dakotas, Kansas, and Nebraska. Populist attempts to win black voters damaged their efforts in the South, which remained strongly Democratic (the party that then recognized the dominance of southern whites). The attempted alliance with urban workers, who had little interest in policies that would raise the price of food, failed utterly. And the specialty farmers of the Northeast and the Midwest Corn Belt saw little to gain in addressing the plight of the Plains states’ grain and western states’ silver interests. Rural hard times continued, but the farm revolt fizzled, never again gaining serious political momentum. However, the plight of farmers was placed on the national agenda as a set of problems subsequently addressed by both the Republican and Democratic Parties, and some of the Populist goals were eventually realized (elimination of the gold standard, progressive taxation, government regulation of interest rates and rail transportation, and agricultural price subsidies). The Labor Movement For similar reasons, a revolt was brewing among urban workers. Regardless of the achievements of Gilded Age capitalism, workers lived and worked under horrid conditions. By 1900, the toilers in factories, mines, and sweatshops represented more than 35 percent of the total labor force. They worked, that is, only in good times, for the periodic business slumps that plagued the turn of the century routinely threw 18 percent of the labor force out of work. But life for workingclass families was hard and precarious in the best of times. In 1900, workers toiled an average of 60 hours a week for wages less than $2 a day. One in four women had jobs, as did over 2 million children, few of whom attended school. Men, women, and children worked amid the smoke, flame, and the din of furnaces and exposed machinery. They were routinely killed or maimed by boiler explosions, mine cave-ins, or train wrecks, and few collected any form of compensation. Nor was there any recognition of, or compensation for, any of the slower forms of industrial death that we would today recognize as black lung disease among miners or the various forms of industrial poisoning. Tuberculosis, the joint product of crowding, overwork, filth, and poor nutrition, reached epidemic proportions among the working class. The United States came to have the highest industrial accident rate in the world: In 1917 alone, 11,000 workers were killed by their jobs, and 1.4 million were injured (Bernhard et al., 1991: 573–634). In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, labor protest emerged as strikes and often violent confrontations between workers and their employers. Beginning as violent encounters during the 1860s in the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania, they returned in the 1870s and 1880s as a broad wave of violent strikes in the steel mills and factories in the industrial Northeast and Upper Midwest. During the strike against the McCormick farm implement company in Chicago in 1886, someone threw a bomb at a rally in Haymarket Square that killed one policeman and injured 70 others. Such incidents angered industrialists and frightened a broad spectrum of the middle classes. They helped trigger a popular wave of anti-labor sentiment. Public officials gave wide latitude to company thugs and hired guns to suppress and disrupt strikes and labor protest, and they often called in the state militia to do the same. In truth, working people were as often the victims of violence as its perpetrators. While such labor protest was often spontaneous, labor movement organizations emerged to give coherence and direction to the workers’ protest movement. The largest of these, the Knights of Labor, open to all workers, had 700,000 members by the 1880s. It focused on political reform rather than strikes and collective bargaining. The Knights agitated for a mandated eight-hour workday, graduated income tax, consumer and producer cooperatives, and federal government arbitration of labor disputes. While not advocating strikes, they supported workers in the disputes mentioned earlier. The Knights declined precipitously in a wave of anti-unionism following the Haymarket Square bombing incident. The Knights were eclipsed by the American Federation of Labor (AF of L), founded in 1886 to organize skilled workers and craftsmen who were increasingly threatened by the mechanization of production. Under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, the AF of L concluded that capitalism was here to stay. Avoiding involvement in broad political reforms, the AF of L focused on narrow workplace issues, such as wages and benefits. Partly because of this nonthreatening political agenda and partly because of Gompers’s tireless efforts to portray the union as a peaceful and “respectable” potential “partner” in the industrial capitalist enterprise, the AF of L was successful in organizing highly skilled, largely native-born workers. It had 250,000 members in 1897 and over 1.6 million by 1904 (Bernhard et al., 1991: 646). By 1905, unskilled workers were again being organized as one big union by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW (or “Wobblies,” as they were called) supported collective bargaining and strikes, and advocated a radical transformation from capitalism to syndicalism where workers would own and cooperatively control industries without interference from either the state or political parties. They did not seek the support of politicians, whom they distrusted as too willing to collaborate with capitalists (Dubofsky, 1975: 101–106). In spite of potentially large numbers of unskilled workers to be organized, the IWW was not very successful, probably never having more than 100,000 members. Still, they had enough successes in making significant gains for workers in some industries (lumber, mining, and textiles) to be threatening to industrial leaders. Their syndicalist goals, confrontational tactics, and successes in organizing threatening categories of workers (African Americans and immigrants) made it easy for their opponents to frame them as representing a dangerous rising tide of subversion and immigrant-fueled radicalism, anarchism, and communism. “These successes, plus their opposition to World War I, led the government to allow companies and vigilante groups a free hand in eliminating the local organizers by any means necessary. By 1917, after a raid on IWW headquarters, 200 top officials were indicted for espionage and sedition. The union declined as its energies and funds were expended in legal battles” (Ford, 1988: 208). In all, over 2000 Wobblies, socialists, and pacifists became trapped in a powerful World War I-era “witch hunt” that transformed dissent into subversion (Goldberg, 1991: 61). In spite of the defeat of the politically oriented unions, the labor movement made small and slow gains in establishing its public legitimacy and its fights to mobilize and to bargain with employers. To illustrate, consider the unprecedented action by a Republican president (Theodore Roosevelt) in 1902, who not only refused to send federal troops to break up a strike, but threatened to send the army to take over mines if the owners refused to arbitrate with representatives of the mineworkers’ union. And while the National Association of Manufacturers was founded in 1895 to resist all unionization, many industrialists (including steel baron Andrew Carnegie) found reasons to support the more conservative and limited trade unionism of the AF of L. Slowly the union movement came to be an important source of support for the Democratic Party, and after his election in 1913 Democratic President Woodrow Wilson rewarded labor by establishing the federal Department of Labor and by sponsoring the Clayton Antitrust Act. This act, hailed by the AF of L as labor’s Magna Carta, replaced previous antitrust legislation which, though designed to oppose industrial monopolies (combinations in restraint of trade), was judicially redefined to become a favorite legal tool to oppose unions. It was still true, however, that the predominant force of government action and public opinion was antiunion. But by the 1920s unions were larger, more prosperous, more bureaucratic, and less democratic at the national level. In 1920, they represented 12 percent of all employed persons (Ford, 1988: 210–212). The 1930s presented a greatly expanded opportunity structure for union growth and impact. With almost a third of the labor force unemployed, the Great Depression caused more people to question the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism, and both public opinion and the federal government became more supportive of the labor movement. The movement again tried to organize unskilled industrial workers, now spearheaded by a breakaway faction of the AF of L, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Headed by Iowa native John L. Lewis of the United Mineworkers, they had great success in organizing industrial unions in the automobile, rubber, and steel industries where the AF of L had never done well (Ford, 1988: 214– 215). Newly powerful mass unions quickly became an essential element of the Democratic New Deal coalition of President Franklin Roosevelt. While its primary aim was economic recovery, the New Deal programs addressed many of the demands of workers, established their absolute right to organize, and mandated federal arbitration of labor disputes. The explosive confrontations between workers and their employers of the previous decades gradually gave way to regulated negotiation. Union growth continued through and after World War II, and it peaked in the 1960s when 31.5 percent of the American labor force was unionized. American workers had come to have one of the world’s highest standards of living. The Progressive Movement For all the prosperity of the years between 1897 and 1917, Americans experienced a puzzling price inflation. Industries produced more, but Americans found themselves struggling to stretch their dollars to buy the same goods they had bought a year earlier. Few understood the phenomenon, but urban middle classes, perhaps the hardest hit, blamed the large trusts and monopolies. President Wilson said, for instance, “The high cost of living is arranged by private understanding.” Others blamed organized l...