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Chapter 3 The Police and the First May Day Strike for the Eight-Hour Day In the period after the Civil War, a new working class emerged in the United States. On the one hand, the nation’s economy increasingly relied on wage workers in factories and mills, on the railroads and construction projects, and in lumberyards and mines. Owners and managers sought to strip control over the production process from skilled artisans and direct it themselves to maximize profits, though many skilled workers and artisans retained their strategic economic position in the late 1860s. This created a situation in which a large number of people with little chance of establishing their own shops were forced to sell their labor power to the highest bidder. All of these trends had begun much earlier, but the war and its aftermath gave them a huge boost. At the same time, U.S. workers began to organize themselves in a more class-conscious way than their predecessors. Workers did not share a common set of ideas, and remained divided along lines of skill, ethnicity, race, and gender. Yet by forming unions and working together to promote their interests politically, many workers implicitly rejected the individualism of the dominant culture and saw that collective action on a class basis provided them with a chance of improving their situation.1 By the 1860s, then, a U.S. working class was coalescing both because an increasing number of people worked for wages and because those wage workers were increasingly coming together in a variety of collective ways to address their common problems. Chicago was a key center of both aspects of working-class formation. Before the Civil War, Chicago’s leading businessmen were boosters who, like William Ogden, made their fortunes through real-estate speculation, and whose success depended on the continued growth of the community. Small enterprises were the primary employer of wage workers. Skilled workers sought to become independent artisans, and often succeeded. Then, during 58 chapter 3 and after the war, Chicago transformed into a manufacturing and distribution center, relying on the labor of thousands of wage workers. Iron manufacturing expanded to employ 9,623 men by 1873, and to service a host of industries that produced finished goods out of iron, such as Cyrus McCormick’s giant agricultural implements business. The Civil War created a huge demand for salt pork and cut off Cincinnati’s river access to the southern market, allowing Chicago to emerge as the country’s leading meatpacking center, and by war’s end the city’s nine largest railroads and the Pork Packer’s Association had formed the Union Stockyards and Transit Company. Leather, gelatin, boot, and shoe manufacturers, and other industries that depended on meatpacking byproducts, expanded accordingly. The size of these industries also grew tremendously, so that by 1870 about 38 percent of Chicago’s population worked for wages, 75 percent of them in firms employing more than twentyfive workers. Three giant meatpacking companies, two huge railcar works, two large furniture manufacturers, four agricultural implements companies, and six iron firms each employed hundreds of workers. Because Chicago stood at the center of a vast railroad network and its population was rapidly expanding, these companies drew on a national labor market, and consequently both workers and their employers faced competitive pressures on a national level for wages, working hours, and productivity. By the end of the war, Chicago possessed a large and growing pool of wage workers, many now managed by supervisors and subject to a minute division of labor, pushed to work extremely long hours for low pay, and facing competition for jobs from workers throughout the country.2 On a national level, workers’ organizations reached a new peak during and immediately after the war. Workers rebuilt the unions that had been set back by the panic of 1857, and they also formed eight-hour leagues in almost every state to push for legislation that would limit the legal workday to eight hours. Immediately after the war these unions and eight-hour leagues embarked on a program of unification under the leadership of William Sylvis, head of the International Molders Union, which eventually led to the formation of the National Labor Union. The newly formed unions also engaged in a number of hard-fought strikes, most notably three Iron Molders strikes in Cincinnati in 1866.3 These fights were often over control of the production process and the right to hire apprentices.4 Sylvis and others...

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