Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor. Not!

The Statue of Liberty, who lifts her lamp beside the Golden Door, aka the New York City Harbor, is famous world-wide as symbol of Freedom and of the United States itself. The statue, a gift to the US from the people of France, has stood on Liberty Island, just a short distance from Ellis Island, since its dedication in October of 1886.  Lady Liberty was introduced with great fanfare, including a parade and speeches by dignitaries, including President Cleveland. Some estimates put the size of the crowd assembled around the harbor at nearly one million.

A bronze plaque bearing the lines of Emma Lazarus's 1883 sonnet, "The New Colossus," was mounted inside the lower level of the statue in 1903.

However, not everybody was participating in the jubilation surrounding the dedication of this icon of Libertas, the Roman Goddess of freedom.  An op-ed piece in the Cleveland-Gazette, an African-American newspaper, blasted away at the government's failure to support the civil liberties of black citizens:

"Liberty enlightening the world," indeed! The expression makes us sick. This government is a howling farce. It can not or rather does not protect its citizens within its own borders. Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the "liberty" of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed.

Eastern European immigrants arriving in New York Harbor.

On the other hand, for very different reasons than the Gazette gave, the US government had already begun regulating who could enter the US.  In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first major legislation to prohibit free entry to a particular group. (The act was renewed in 1892 and 1902).  The motivation for this act was spawned by the large influx of Chinese immigrants during the California Gold Rush (1848-1855)   After the Civil War the building of the Transcontinental Railroads brought another flood of Chinese immigration to provide more cheap labor.  By the 1880s the Chinese in California were being blamed for a number of problems, most notably for unemployment among whites.

This Act was the first in the series of moves designed to control the admission and freedoms given new immigrants. For example, in 1887 Henry F.Bowers founded the American Protective Association, an anti-Catholic group. Its aim was to "protect" white Midwesterners from the latest immigrant groups from Southern and Eastern Europe.  The fear and prejudice directed at these groups was well illustrated in 1891 by the lynching of 11 Italian immigrants (who had just been acquitted of a murder charge) by several upstanding citizens in New Orleans.

On January 1, 1892, the Ellis Island Immigration Station opened in New York harbor to accommodate the masses of immigrants pouring into the U.S. from Europe. (The peak year 1907 saw more than one million arrivals pass through its doors.) During the period 1880-1930 immigrants from Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Italy outnumbered the immigrants from Anglophone countries more than 3 to 1. Some of these new immigrants (including my grandfather, Anton Katilius, from Lithuania)  found their way to Homestead.  

A boatload of a number of the "huddled masses" headed for Ellis Island.

 At the time of the Strike, Slovak workers constituted a large portion of the unskilled workforce in the Works.  Although they initially supported the skilled workers of the Amalgamated Association in the strike, by its conclusion in November, many of the Eastern European workers returned to their low-wage jobs. while the AA members and higher-paid workers were shut out by the company.

As in every industry from railroad building to steelmaking to mining, although initially these immigrants were welcomed--and often offered incentives--by the companies they worked for, inevitably the two forces would come to blows.  As the newer immigrants assimilated, they became ambitious for better pay and working conditions, and so began organizing.  The companies would crush them or shut them out, starting a new turn in the endless cycle in  American industry's quest for cheap labor.

A newly-arrived immigrant family gazes at Lady Liberty from Ellis Island.

The period of great European immigration saw continued strife between older immigrant groups and new arrivals.  If any in the former group couldn't find work, they would blame the recent immigrants for taking their jobs.  Each immigrant group has tried to slam shut the Golden Door behind them as they passed through--as of course is continuing today in the numerous efforts to control and.choke off immigration from Latin American countries.  Latino workers are the most recent in a long line of immigrant groups exploited in low-wage jobs, then vilified when they try to break into better-paying ones.

As the strikers at the Homestead Works found out in 1892, economic hard times significantly reduce the power of the workers: The number of workers exceeds the number of available jobs. Companies argue that they need concessions by the workers to keep afloat.  The wealthiest have control not only over the nation's workers, but over legislatures, courts, banks, and police. The rich get richer while all the rest get poorer.

As I showed in a previous blog post, the economic situation today in the US eerily parallels the  conditions following the Panic of 1893, with similar causes and results. Let me therefore conclude with one of the many charts available on the Net showing the gross inequality in distribution of wealth in the US today:

 Who's responsible for this shocking disparity between the Rich and the Rest of Us?  Believe me, it ain't the Mexicans.

How the Other One Percent Lives

As of last year, reports show that 1% of the American population owns 35% of the nation's privately-held wealth.  The bottom 80% (salaried workers) hold 14%.

Two weekends ago, a Minneapolis newspaper article revealed that Ameriprise Financial CEO James Cracciolo receives $715,000 in perks and another $18 million in salary.  I looked at those figures and blinked.  My investments are with Ameriprise.  How much of the fees I pay the company go to him, I wondered.  When I complained to my Ameriprise financial adviser, she told me that the article had touched off a firestorm of outrage among both clients and Ameriprise employees.  Will Jimmy C. repent his greedy ways and accept less? Not on your life. He and the boards of directors of these big corporations have the system wired so that, throwing their shareholders a bone now and then, they keep the big bucks flowing right into their growing coffers. [Update: In 2009 I moved my investments to Thrivent, a non-profit financial company.]

It was ever thus. No matter what you call them--kings or corporate heads--these privileged few get the huge cuts of the pie.  Take, for example, Carnegie Steel in 1891.  Workers at the Homestead mill made between $1-2 a day for laborers to nearly $8 a day for the few top skilled workers (such as melters).  To earn this pay, they worked in extremely dangerous conditions for 10-12 hours a day, six days a week.  The infamous strike of '92 came about because the company (that is, Carnegie and Frick) decided that the skilled workers, members of the Amalgamated, were making too much.  When the union contract ran out, the company declared that it would henceforth negotiate wages only with individuals.  Translation:  Goodbye, collective bargaining.  After that, it was literally every man for himself.

To make matters worse for the workers, in 1893 a "panic," brought on by the overbuilding of railroads, resulted in a series of bank failures. Guess who lost their jobs. For the next decade, the unemployment rate in the U.S. stayed around 10%.  Greed fuels bad decisions by corporations and banks. These trigger an economic crisis, and millions lose their jobs. 'Sound familiar?

While my dad was alive, my mother kept her views of the Strike to herself. My father had definite opinions about the Strike (after all, he had written his senior paper at Pitt on the subject), and Mum had no desire throw in her two cents' worth. While she had no direct connection with US Steel, she and her family relied on it for their livelihood.  As in the 1890s,  the town economy was completely dependent upon the mill throughout most of the 20th century.

However, after Dad's death, Mum broke her silence.  We were discussing one of the books about the Strike (see sidebar), and I commented that I was appalled at how strikers attacked the Pinkertons during and after the battle.  Her immediate response was to cry: "They were fighting for their lives!"  If she had been there, she probably would have been one of the women who ran to the riverbank to stop the Pinkertons from coming ashore.
 
On another occasion, we were looking at my Grandfather Busch's pocket watches, which Dad, being the only son, had inherited.  The sturdy watch with a nickel case is the one he took to the machine shop daily; the other, smaller one has a 14-karat case.  Mum opened the gold watch and showed me the inscription inside: from the men of the Homestead Machine Shop to G. W. Busch on his retirement in 1937.

"Can you believe this?" Mum asked indignantly. "He worked nearly 50 years, most of these as a superintendent, and the men, not the company, give him his retirement watch. The only thing US Steel gave him was a small pension--and he was one of their top bosses!"  (One can easily extrapolate that the other workers were treated even more shabbily.)

Antique watch specialist Marshall Ferster told me that the gold watch was made in NY in 1922. Ferster says that as was the custom, the watch likely was bought used (from Katilius?) in 1937 with money collected from the men of the machine shop.  They had it engraved and presented it to him as their thanks for his service. (Ferster restored the nickel watch, and I keep it by my laptop, where it cheerfully keeps ticking away as I work.)

Well, all that's ancient history, as Dad used to stay.  US Steel's Homestead Works is gone, as are many of the thousands of people who once worked there.  Still, sometimes a turn of the page in the Business section of a newspaper will bring into sharp focus a fact that hasn't changed in many decades:  The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

If this be treason, make the most of it.