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2 Working People’s Responses to Past Depressions david montgomery Since the founding of the Republic, working men and women have been all too familiar with alternating periods of boom times and hard times, with seasonal unemployment, with marked differences in availability of jobs among various parts of the country, and with general depressions abruptly precipitated by overproduction of wares or by bank panics. Not all downturns struck with the same severity. The crisis of the early 1840s pitched nine state governments into default (primarily in the rapidly expanding cotton kingdom ), while the depression that began in 1873 sent ten state governments into default over the ensuing eleven years. The sharp collapse between the spring of 1907 and the spring of 1908 so crippled the economy that for many months more immigrants left the United States for their homelands or other countries than disembarked here, while the depressions of 1873–79, 1893–98, and 1929–40 set the stage for fundamental restructuring of industrial, agricultural , and political life.1 Vigorous economic expansion between the mid-1820s and the crisis of 1837 (augmented by rising tariffs and by chronic surpluses in federal budgets) stimulated massive sales and transportation of slaves from the Southeast to the booming Cotton Belt. They also attracted a swelling tide of immigration from Europe and migration of rural women to seek wages in port cities and in scattered mill towns. These boom years gave rise to numerous strikes and to the formation of effective trade unions, especially in the thriving ports of Philadelphia and New York. Representatives of fifty occupations in Philadelphia, ranging from dock laborers, handloom weavers, and suburban factory operatives at the poorer end of the income scale to bookbinders, cabinet makers, and butchers at the upper end, contributed monthly dues to citywide delegate bodies (called the Trades’ Union) to help finance each other’s strikes and the city’s famous general strike for a ten-hour day in 1835.2 Prominent leaders of the Trades’ Unions in both cities became heavily involved in municipal politics. The depression that had gripped much of the nation by the summer of 1837 crushed most unions, emptied their formerly lucrative treasuries, and left little possibility of successful strikes. As one prominent Philadelphian confided to his diary in 1842: The streets seem deserted, the largest houses are shut up and to rent, there is no business, there is no money, no confidence & little hope, property is sold every day by the sheriff at a 4th of the estimated value of a few years ago, nobody can pay debts, the miseries of poverty are felt by both rich & poor.3 By the mid-1840s, however, a renewal of capital inflows from Europe, resurgence of canal and railroad construction, conquest of half the previous territory of Mexico, and a flood of German, Irish, and other immigrants opened the way to almost three decades of rather steady increases in per capita output—to be sure, punctuated by half a dozen relatively brief recessions and a severe manufacturing downturn between 1857 and 1861, not to mention a civil war. The 1850s represented a nodal point in this transformation. The iron ship, the telegraph, railroad trunk lines, gold rushes, and enactment by several states of general incorporation laws lent a modern flavor to the era. Most noteworthy, at some point between the census of 1850 and that of 1860, the number of people over ten years of age who were counted as wage laborers (in the United States, which was still dominated by agricultural landowners) came to surpass the number of those counted as slaves.4 The subsequent destruction of slavery by the Civil War enabled the census of 1870 to classify as wage earners more than half of the men and women then listed as “gainfully employed.”5 In the autumn of 1873, the overinvestment in railroad expansion led the banking house of Jay Cooke to collapse—the bank whose sales of 5–20 bonds to both small investors and large financial institutions from the earliest days of the Civil War onward had decisively funded the Union war effort and earned Cooke the reputation of the financier who rallied ordinary people to save the imperiled Union. Prices and wages fell to historically unprecedented levels after Cooke’s failure, devastating the standards once upheld by even the strongest unions, like those of Pennsylvania’s anthracite miners and New England’s shoe workers , and ultimately in July 1877 unleashing a wave of strikes that swept along...

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