WEGAI - The Closing of the West (Lesson)
The Closing of the West
Old Conflict
As eastern regions of the United States became more industrialized after the Civil War, people seeking rural livelihoods moved farther and farther west. In turn, Native Americans had to compete with these newcomers for land. For example, the Sioux signed a treaty with the U.S. government promising "no white person or persons shall be permitted to settle upon or occupy" Sioux territory in the Dakotas; but, when gold was discovered there, the government tried to buy the land from the Sioux, who refused to sell it. The Sioux leader, Sitting Bull, then fought U.S. Army troops, led his people to a brief exile in Canada, and finally agreed to settle on a reservation.
About ten years later, Sitting Bull's people became associated with a Sioux religious movement. The Native Americans believed their ceremonies would cleanse the world of evil, including the white man, and restore the Sioux's lost greatness. Government officials ordered Sitting Bull's arrest. He died in a brief gun battle.
After Sitting Bull died, several hundred of his people fled to an area of South Dakota called Wounded Knee. U.S. soldiers went there to confiscate weapons from the Sioux. A gun was fired - nobody knows by whom - and U.S. soldiers then opened machine-gun fire, killing more than 300 Sioux. This ended the Native Americans' long conflict against Americans settling Native American lands.
View the presentation below on the Closing of the Western Frontier.
New Immigrants
In the decades after the Civil War, increasing numbers of Europeans immigrated to America. They differed from earlier immigrant groups who mostly came from northern and western Europe, were typically Protestant, spoke English, and arrived with the government's welcome. In contrast, many of the new immigrants came from eastern and southern Europe, often were Jewish or Roman Catholic, and usually spoke no English. The U.S. government welcomed the wealthy among these new immigrants but forced poorer people to pass health and welfare tests at government reception centers such as the Ellis Island Immigrant Station located in New York Harbor.
Whether Asian or European, these new immigrants tended to settle in areas populated by people from the same countries who spoke the same languages and worshiped in the same ways. Because poverty and political instability were common in their home countries, the new immigrants were likely to be poor. They could not afford to buy farmland, so they worked as unskilled laborers and lived mostly in cities. There they created communities to imitate the cultures of their home countries, including foreign-language newspapers, ethnic stores and restaurants, and houses of worship. The new immigrants did not blend into American society the way earlier immigrants had. Cities grew rapidly during this time and new buildings and other structures were built to accommodate this growing urban population. View the presentation below on Late 19th-century urbanization.
The Unionization of the American Workplace
In the last quarter of the 19th-century, the United States’ GDP (Gross Domestic Product) grew faster than any other nation on the planet. The center of the nation’s economic boom was industrial capitalism.
One consequence of the huge economic growth in the United States was massive immigration—between 1865 and 1918 27.5 million immigrants flooded into the United States in search of economic opportunity and a better life.
Additionally, in the late 19th century, industrial capitalism was new and sometimes dangerous and harsh. Between 1881 and 1900 35,000 workers died each year as a result of workplace accidents.
American Federation of Labor and Samuel Gompers
Unskilled laborers were subject to low wages, long workdays, no vacations, and unsafe workplaces. Because individual workers had little power to change the way an employer ran a business, workers banded together in labor unions to demand better pay and working conditions. Then the labor unions banded together for even more power to change the ways employers ran their businesses. The American Federation of Labor, or AFL, was led by Samuel Gompers. He was president of the AFL from 1886 to 1894 and from 1895 to his death in 1924. His goal was to use strikes (work stoppages) to convince employers to give workers shorter workdays, better working conditions, higher wages, and greater control over how they carried out their workplace responsibilities.
As unions increased, so did the number of strikes annually. For example, in 1892, there were 1,298 strikes involving 164,000 workers/union members.
Samuel Gompers (originally “Gumpertz”) (1850-1924) was a British-born American cigar maker and labor union leader. He founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL---it merged with the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) in 1955 and has 12,000,000 members today in 56 unions) and Gompers served as its president from 1886-1894 and 1895-1924 (the year of his death.) Gompers was known for encouraging harmony among craft unions of the AFL, promoting organization and collective bargaining in order to achieve the reduced hours and higher wages that he deemed vital for helping workers.
Gompers also encouraged union members to vote for their friends and defeat the workers’ political enemies (those who didn’t support workers’ interests.) He generally supported Democrats and a few local Republicans.
He opposed those people who were against Chinese immigration and anti-World War I labor groups. Gompers and the AFL supported WWI and worked to avoid labor strikes and to boost morale and to increase wages for workers and membership in the AFL during the war years.
Finally, Gompers encouraged workers to increase their education since he believed that a well-educated membership led to strong, well-financed trade unions; he worked to “humanize” industry, to protect workers’ rights, and to improve working conditions.
Pullman Strike
During poor economic times in the 1870s and 1890s, violence erupted when employers sought to fire some workers and lower the wages of those still employed. In 1894, when the Pullman railcar factory near Chicago fired almost half its workforce and cut wages by 25% to 50%, its workers went on strike. Other railway workers refused to switch Pullman cars on or off trains. Rail traffic west of Chicago came to a halt.
The Pullman Company responded by hiring new workers, but they were attacked by strikers when they attempted to go to work. Leaders of the railroad industry convinced the government to declare the situation illegal. President Grover Cleveland sent the U.S. Army to restore peace. Big business and the U.S. government both feared labor unions were a menace to America's capitalist economy.
Homestead Strike
Another well-known strike was the Homestead Strike at Carnegie Steel’s Homestead Steel Works outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1892.
On June 29, 1892, Henry Frick, the manager of Homestead Steelworks wanted to break the union of skilled steel workers who controlled the workflow on the shop floor in the mill and slowed production. Frick locked the members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) out of the mill and the following day, the union members went on strike.
Frick hired strikebreakers (commonly called ‘scabs’) to cross the picket lines outside the plant. The strikebreakers weren’t “normal” strikebreakers though---they were from the Pinkerton Detective Agency and were actually armed men whose task was to re-open the steel mill.
On July 6, 1892, gunfire broke out between the striking union members and the 300 Pinkerton “detectives.” After both sides had several men killed, the Pinkerton agents surrendered the next day.
On July 11, 6,000 militiamen were deployed by the governor of Pennsylvania, marched into town, and re-opened the steel mill. The state sided with the steel mill management and the strike was over.
Harper's Weekly illustration of the Pennsylvania state militia marching on the Homestead Steelworks, 1892. Image courtesy Library of Congress.
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