The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink
North in the Civil War, the railroad vouchsafed the strength of the Union, but on the backs of two equally exploited, if unequally cursed, groups of immigrant stoop laborers: the Irish working from the East and the Chinese working from the West. In 1863 alone, nearly 100,000 Irish laborers accepted pacts with a combination of U.S. military and emigration society recruiters for steamship tickets. Among those not immediately outfitted in Union uniforms, few escaped either the steamship or the holding pens at New York City’s Castle Garden without signing a labor contract. Beginning in 1864, the federal government (concerned with the drain of manpower into the army) itself promised for the first time to enforce labor contracts made on foreign soil. Almost immediately, employers took advantage of the situation to break strikes with directly imported laborers. 31
The confinement of the Chinese was yet more conspicuous, and notorious. In the midst of devastating Chinese civil wars across the 1850s and 1860s, a combination of forced (or “coolie”) labor and the lure of voluntary, cheap steerage fares on steamship routes from Hong Kong to San Francisco accounted for a huge surge of labor migrants on long-term contracts bound for the railroad camps. The Hui-Kuan, aka the Chinese Six Companies, acted as effective padrones over the immigrant workforce, setting up contracts and effectively enforcing them on worker and railroad alike. In any case, the combination of high death rates, low wages, and constraining contracts (the so-called credit-ticket system) easily opened the Chinese labor experiment to charges of “slavery,” which, combined with racist stereotypes, quickly led to campaigns to exclude the Chinese from competition with “white” workers as well as to forbid their further entry into the country altogether. From such origins of ethnic marginalization emerged one of the sorriest chapters of American labor history, one in which even the generally egalitarian Knights of Labor joined with a vengeance.
The switch from a campaign against importation of Chinese, along with other contract laborers, to one against Chinese immigration tout court developed only in stages, and with substantial misgivings within the organized labor community. Throughout the 1860s, for example, William Sylvis, iron molders’ and National Labor Union president and leader of the national campaign against contract labor, insisted that the imported workers “should not be spurned and treated as enemies,” since “they are only the dupes of the wily agents.” Even as Dennis Kearney made Chinese exclusion a touchstone of the broader-based Workingmen’s Party platform in California—and as other powerful figures like Maine’s Sen. James G. Blaine proclaimed the incompatibility of the “man who must have beef and bread, and would prefer beer” and the “man who can live on rice”—most of organized labor held back, limiting their policy prescriptions to a ban on all foreign laborers under contract. Typical, for a time, were the reported remarks of New York Central Labor Union President Robert Blissert: “He did not think it right to forbid any of God’s creatures from coming to America. What [he] opposed was the Importation of Slaves.” Alas, by 1880, fearing the arrival of a mass exodus from the “powder keg atmosphere” of San Francisco, even labor radicals like Detroit’s Richard Trevellick and Chicago’s Albert Parsons had succumbed to the anti-Chinese fever. 32
Related to the sins of contract labor for men was the notorious subcontracting system associated with the heavily female garment “sweatshop.” A chain of subcontracting—with each link in the chain determined to squeeze a profit from the barest margins of productivity—accounted for the sense of exploitation associated with sweating. In abominable conditions, women toiled, as turn-of-the-century journalist Eva McDonald Valesh reported, “under a cunningly devised slavery, until death mercifully sets them free.” Indeed, from the turn of the century, the distinctive structure of the urban garment shop—in particular the centrality of the contractor in relation to an immigrant labor force—evoked initial parallels to the critique of “coolieism” on the West Coast. Most important, public blame for such un-American practice for a time swung precariously between employers and workers themselves. Concerns about new immigrant cleanliness, criminality, and health threatened to downgrade the status of Jews as a whole on the contemporary “evolutionary ladder.” In 1905, the commissioner general of immigration thus generically condemned Jewish immigrants as “decrepit men and women.” 33
What saved the Jews the opprobrium visited on the Chinese was the deflection of the discourse of immigrant “degeneracy” to one of environmental degradation. In the case of the Russian Jews, a host of agents—German Jews, middle-class public-health and reform advocates, as well as the contemporary labor movement—effectively identified industrial capitalism (as exemplified by the sweatshop), not race, as the culprit. In the ensuing discourse of factory inspection, as championed by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the “modern” factory was contrasted to the sweatshop as a means to improve sanitation, eliminate degrading homework, and lift the overall cultural profile of the immigrant community. In the factory, or “model shop” as articulated by the industry’s union-management Joint Board of Sanitary Control after 1910, “the boss remained, but healthy male workers earned a family wage, while enjoying a host of comforts and conveniences… . Where the sweatshop enfeebled, the model shop cured.” Restore the working-class family’s “independence”—as effected by the male provider—the argument suggested, and the wolf of unfreedom could be kept at the door. It is worth noting that the “sweatshop debate” helped to cut short a more systemic discussion of the iniquities of free labor and the free contract. With proper control—in particular a place for unions in the negotiation of wages and conditions—workers, it seemed, could transform the sweatshop from Exhibit A of capitalistic iniquity into “a correctable problem of poor management.” 34
After intense lobbying by the Knights of Labor and other labor reformers, Congress first systematically grappled with the problem of contract labor in the 1885 Foran Act, which specified fines on labor importers as well as immediate deportation of all workers brought to America under contract. Yet the act proved to be riddled with contradictions inherent in free-labor thought itself. Reflecting an all-out skepticism toward labor recruitment, the law voided “all contracts” to import foreign workers, making no distinction between voluntary and involuntary service. Absent a work contract, however, the would-be immigrant laborer arriving at Castle Garden faced a bind: how could he prove he would not become a public charge (another grounds for deportation)? Parsing legislative intent, the courts tended to create their own, highly racialized distinctions between “ignorant” or “coerced” migrants and individuals who had clearly come on their own, informed volition. What one government investigator called a “curious contradiction” in immigration law was only fitfully resolved by subsequent legislation specifically targeting the immigrant padrone (or labor contractor) for prosecution and exempting skilled workers recruited to fill designated industrial needs. 35 By emphasizing the moral depravity of the padrone preying on helpless (especially Italian) child laborers, moreover, the administrators of the Foran Act slowly turned it away from its original intent. From “a critique of the doctrine of voluntary contract,” argues historian Gunther Peck, it became “an instrument of its ideological defense.” Meanwhile, the problem of immigrant contract labor waned on its own. Free immigration itself proved quite plentiful (at least until drastic immigration restriction in 1924), and corporate personnel managers replaced padrones in supplying industry with a tractable labor force. 36
A similar preoccupation—at least among middle-class labor reformers—with immoral recruitment and hiring practices focused on female domestic workers. In New York City, for example, as historian Vanessa H. May has documented, Frances Kellor and the National Municipal League focused particularly on “tenement” employment agencies, effectively unregulated family-based enterprises, which served as go-betweens to “respectable” middle-class households. These unscrupulous agents, reformers alleged, lured young immigrant and African American arrivals to the city with offers of employment, at once charging the domestics exorbitant fees and exposing their employers to a “class of diseased, paupers, criminals, and degenerates.” A 1904 employment agency law, by setting licensing fees and “business-like” standards on the industry, sought to drive the small-fry recruiters out of business; the law, alas, did nothing for the wages and working conditions of domestic workers themselves. 37
From the perspective of Gilded Age workers, the most noxious form of labor contracting probably derived from the employment