9 - Layering Law and Resistance in the Great Strikes

Summary

Chapter 9 traces worker repression in and around the 1877 worker protests. The crucible of low-road capitalism delivered the Great Strikes of 1877, but the layers of enforcement - from citizens and local police to militia and national troops - reveal the exclusive nature of the new industrial order. Since the Panic of 1873, railroad corporations had maintained profitability by lowering the wages of their workers. By 1877, workers’ wages moved from unequal to unsustainable as many now earned half their 1872 pay. While social and political leaders spoke sympathetically of laborers and their low earnings at the start of the Great Strikes, soon, in response to violent acts of working-class resistance (usually against corporate property), such rhetoric disappeared. Instead, these leaders framed workers as vagabonds and criminals - persons in need of surveillance and control. The workers’ violence was used as a reason to attack workingmen’s bodies and labor mutualism. When mixed with the hostile differences of liberal society, differences intended to keep wages low and the working class divided, the laborers on the bottom endured the greatest physical and economic harm.