Silverites, Goldbugs and the Cross of Gold

Part 2 of our series on William Jennings Bryan’s famous 1896 Cross of Gold Speech provides background on the issue at the heart of that momentous address to the Democratic National Convention.

When gold was discovered in California in 1848, there was a Gold Rush that opened the west and changed the nation. When silver was discovered in the west in the 1860s, however, there was no Silver Rush. For decades the federal government had valued silver at 16:1 against gold—that is, it took 16 ounces of silver to equal 1 ounce of gold in value. It was much more lucrative to find gold than silver.

But the U.S. was not on the gold standard. Anyone could turn in gold or silver in any form—jewelry, bars, coins, etc.—to a U.S. Mint and receive dollars for their metal. Gold and silver could both be turned in for dollars, and this is called bi-metallism. Our currency was backed by silver and gold.

This system was threatened, however, by the Gold Rush. Gold flooded the market, making silver relatively scarce. While the Mint still offered the 16:1 ratio, silver could be sold privately for more—12:1, 10:1, etc. People stopped taking their silver to the Mint and began hoarding it or selling to it private or foreign buyers.

Such was the situation when silver was discovered in Nevada in the 1860s. While there was no Silver Rush, silver did begin to flood the market, and those private buyers and great 12:1 deals for silver dried up. Now you had to take 20:1 or 25:1 deals. But the U.S. Mint was still offering 16:1, and people who found themselves with too much silver on their hands flocked back to the Mint to turn it in for dollars. As a result, more silver dollars were minted.

All of this silver being turned in for dollars was good news for westerners, rural farmers, and the poor because it put more dollars into circulation. You can’t spend your silver jewelry, but you’ll spend the dollars you get for it. More money in circulation means there’s less of a need for people to borrow money, and that drives down interest rates. Farmers who needed to buy the new farm equipment that the Industrial Revolution was making necessary could buy it without going into debt with a loan. Poor people could buy more goods. These were the Silverites, who welcomed the liquidity of bi-metallism during a silver boom.

But not everyone was happy. The heart of business in the U.S. was in the east, on Wall Street and in the big industrial cities, and eastern banks had made fortunes loaning money to westerners, especially farmers, and charging high interest rates. With the boom in silver, that was diminished, and big business cried foul to the government through its lobbyists. These were the Goldbugs, who wanted to make dollars scarce by stopping the conversion of silver to dollars.

The situation came to a head in 1873. All that basically worthless silver pouring into the federal government for a decade had caused an economic crisis. The dollar was being backed more and more by silver, and less and less by gold. And since silver had lost so much value, the dollar might lose its value abroad. If a European won’t buy your silver, they’re not going to accept your silver-backed dollars. So Congress passed the Coinage Act of 1873, which stated that the dollar would no longer be backed by silver, eliminated the silver dollar, and severely limited how much silver Mints were allowed to accept from the public. Bi-metallism was over.

Silverites called it the “Crime of ’73,” and claimed that justice was thwarted by rich businessmen. Goldbugs celebrated this embrace of the gold standard and claimed it was “sound money” policy.

Now you see what Bryan is driving at. He was from Nebraska, a western farming state whose people were hurting from the clampdown on silver. In his speech he is saying that he will not let the U.S. crucify the common man on a cross of gold—he will not let the government stay on the gold standard at the expense of the poor, the farmer, the western rancher or small businessman. If elected president, he will bring back bi-metallism, the dollar will be backed by gold and silver, and there will be more dollars in circulation, reducing debt.

Next time: close-reading the speech

The “Cross of Gold” speech: what is it about?

Welcome to a series on William Jennings Bryan’s famous 1896 Cross of Gold speech. This speech, delivered at the Democratic National Convention, helped win the Bryan, former Representative to Congress for Nebraska, the presidential nomination of the Democratic party. It’s a very famous speech and it was powerfully delivered, and was so popular that for decades after the convention Bryan was asked to deliver the Cross of Gold speech, and did.

But let’s start by being frank: this speech suffers, for the 21st-century reader, from two major drawbacks: first, and foremost, it never makes clear what on Earth the problem is that it’s addressing; and second, it is written in the bombastic 19th-century style that thrives on rhetorical flourishes and long, drawn-out analogies. Thus it’s hard for modern-day readers to make much headway through Cross of Gold. One might read the entire speech and not understand what issue Bryan is addressing. The reason for this is that by the time he gave this speech, the issue of coining silver v. remaining on the gold standard had been a violently contested political, social, and economic issue for decades. Bryan’s audience didn’t need a lesson on what the issue was. Everyone in that convention hall knew what their party’s stand was on silver, and all Bryan had to do was to reinforce the righteousness of that stance by talking about how it would help the farmer and other “common men”. It would be like giving a speech today where you just kept saying “Tea Party ideas”—your audience would know what that shorthand means. You wouldn’t have to explain it. You could just talk about how a) harmful or b) good those ideas were, depending on your political stance.

But today, we know little about the savage war over the coinage of silver, and this has created a terrible vacuum where we continue to study Bryan’s famous speech with almost no background on what it was addressing and no conception of what it means. It has become a ritual with no meaning. Let’s rectify that here.

We’ll move into the background of the speech next time with a history of the battle between Silverites and Goldbugs, as they were called, and the principles they were fighting over. It is actually fascinating, and focuses on themes that are still very much front-and-center in 21st-century U.S. politics, including “class warfare”, business v. individual rights, how much control the federal government should have, financial booms and busts, and more.

Next time: Silverites v. Goldbugs

“The most radical president” – some candidates

We heard someone involved in the campaign of a Republican primary candidate recently state that President Obama is “the most radical president in American history.” One is accustomed to hyperbole during an election season, but this was a particularly arresting case of myth-making. I assume this person meant “radical” as a negative, although radical change can be positive or negative. Whether well- or ill-intentioned, though, the claim that our current president is the most radical ever does not hold water. Even an extremely brief glance over presidential history brings to light many other candidates for that title:

George Washington: Radical in a good way. Encouraged a radically new form of government, one without a monarch, even when offered the post himself. Supported our new democratic system, represented it with honor and dignity to the world, and set crucially important precedents, including stepping down from office after his second four-year term. Tried to prevent political parties from forming—if he had been successful, we’d have a radically different political scene today.

Thomas Jefferson: Radical in mixed ways. It’s hard to picture Americans today admiring a president who supported a violent dictatorship and felt the U.S. should provide military support for it (as Jefferson did in France). Jefferson also overrode the Constitution to make the Louisiana Purchase (Congress, not the president, should likely have carried out any geographic expansion).

Andrew Jackson: Radical in a bad way. Sponsored intense corruption within his Administration by appointing cronies to high political office, legislated through the veto, and, most importantly and unforgivably, demanded and carried out the removal of the Native Americans of the southeast, even after the Supreme Court found in favor of the Cherokees’ remaining on their land.

Abraham Lincoln: Radical in a good way. He ended slavery in the United States by writing the Emancipation Proclamation, and refused to negotiate an end to the war by agreeing to allow slavery to continue in a restored Union. Pushed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery through Congress. Planned to move an Amendment giving black men the right to vote through Congress as well. Went from racist to abolitionist in a few short years.

Woodrow Wilson: Radical in mixed ways. Promoted legislation to end child labor, pushed for the creation of the League of Nations and for U.S. membership. On the other hand, an entrenched racist who kept civil rights legislation at bay, helping to ensure that the 1910s extended the nadir of civil rights in this country another decade.

Franklin Roosevelt: Radical in mixed ways. Tried to govern bascially without Congress, tried to tamper with the Supreme Court to make it his tool, pursued a series of economic policies that helped lengthen the Depression. On the other hand, he understood that the government had an obligation to protect vulnerable categories of citizen, such as the elderly, children, and the poor. Provided a reliable federal safety net to these people for the first time in U.S. history.

Lyndon Johnson: Radical in a good way. The series of civil rights acts passed not only during his Administration, but because of his untiring efforts, finally put the nation on the track Lincoln had envisioned for Reconstruction. Education reform, Medicare, urban renewal, conservation, space exploration, and a war on poverty, all pushed forward by Johnson. His failure to see through the advisors who pushed the war in Vietnam is the blot on his record.

Ronald Reagan: Radical in a bad way. Set in motion the anti-government movement amongst conservatives, made cutting taxes and running a federal deficit a battle-cry of the Republican party, was generally unmoved by opportunities to negotiate an end to the Cold War.

George W. Bush: Radical in a bad way. Pursued war with Iraq based on misinformation about Iraqi arms manufacture from advisors, trampled on civil rights in the name of homeland security, and moved aggressively to stop taxation of the wealthy, immobilize the federal government, remove the federal safety net for vulnerable citizens, and pay for the war through deficit spending.

So there’s a short list of some radical presidents. We could use a few more who are radical in good ways.

American Isolationism: The Mock Trial of Hitler

In our last post on American isolationism before WWII we ended with the promise of an extraordinary demonstration against German fascism that took place in the U.S. in March 1934. That event was a mock trial of Adolf Hitler.

This article depends for its quotations on two good sources: “Publicly Deliberative Drama: The 1934 Mock Trial of Adolf Hitler for ‘Crimes against Civilization'”, Louis Anthes, The American Journal of Legal History , Vol. 42, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 391-410; and In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson, Crown, NY, 2011.

The trial, which was attended by 20,000 people, was sponsored by many groups; it originated with the American Jewish Congress and included many labor unions–in fact, two months earlier New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and AFL Vice-President Matthew Woll had led what they termed a working-class anti-fascist rally at the same location, Madison Square Garden. Now they joined two dozen other leaders in American society, religion, and politics, including former New York Court of Appeals Judge Samuel Seabury; John Haynes Holmes, Minister of the Community Church of New York City; Raymond Moley, former Under-Secretaryof State under Roosevelt; and Mayor LaGuardia.

The Case of Civilization v. Hitler begain with an indictment against Hitler and his government which, amongst other crimes, “has not only destroyed the foundations of the German Republic, but, under penalty of death, torture, and economic extermination, and by process of progressive strangulation, has reduced and subjugated to abject slavery all sections of its population.” Hours of speeches from the famous men assembled concluded with a decision against the Nazis. [Anthes 392]

The Nazi government was furious. It had protested to the U.S. State Department before the trial, news of which had reached Germany in February, and Hans Luther, the German Ambassador to the U.S. met repeatedly with State Deparment personnel, including Secretary Cordell Hull; each complaint and meeting ended with the Americans repeating that “our constitutional guaranties of freedom of expression” prohibited the federal government from stopping the trial, or any other peaceful public demonstration. The Germans persisted in complaining, and six days after the trial Luther raged to Hull that “such offensive and insulting acts by the people of one country against the Government and its officials of another country” should not be tolerated. Four days later, he appeared in Hull’s office with a list of what Luther described as “abusive and insulting expressions of American citizens toward the Hitler Government.” [Larson 239]

Hull’s reponse was firm: “…America’s relationship with the previous German government had been ‘uniformly agreeable’ and [it] was only during the control of the present government that the troubles complained of had arisen… The whole problem would go away, Hull intimated, if Germany ‘could only bring about a cessation of these reports of personal injuries which had been coming steadily to the Unitd Stats from Germany and arousing bitter resentment among many people here.” [Ibid, 240]

The mock trial of Hitler on March 7, 1934 was followed by a few other trials and many rallies against fascism, culminating in another Madison Square Garden rally in July 1942, led by Rabbi Wise, against Nazi atrocities. By that time, of course, the U.S. was at war with Nazi Germany. There are echoes of the 1934 trial in the Nuremburg Trials after the war, which the U.S. insisted upon over British and Soviet objections (Britain wanted show trials without a defense, if any, and the Soviets wanted to go straight to executions).

This trial and the anti-Nazi demonstrations that preceded and followed it do not, of course, mean that there was no pro-Nazi sentiment in the U.S; there was, and American fascists held their own rallies and marches. The largest was the German American Bund, which also drew 20,000 people to a rally in New York on President’s Day 1939. One feels more certain that many people attending this rally were truly isolationist; by February 1939 war was just months away, Germany had annexed the Sudetenland and Austria, and there was more concrete concern about America entering another war.

But the majority of Americans in the 1930s were not knee-jerk isolationists; they despised Nazism and were willing to oppose it in many ways, from boycotts to signing petitions to working with relief groups to try to help Jewish Germans. They did not want to fight another war, but they did not refuse to acknowledge that a) the Nazis had to be stopped, and b) that war might be the only way to do this. There is always a vocal minority that grabs the national spotlight; here we have two: the 20,000 who rallied against Hitler and the 20,000 who rallied for him. Given the commitment of Americans to the principles of our Constitution, and their willingness to fight once war did come, it is hard to believe that the latter group had more unspoken support amongst Americans than the former.

Were Americans really isolationist before WWII?

There are a few things you will read almost without fail in any history of the U.S., from textbook to blog: the Puritans had a strong work ethic; Americans were the underdogs in the Revolutionary War, Andrew Jackson was a champion of the common man; Mary Todd Lincoln was insane; and Americans were isolationists before each of the World Wars. Generally, the more you read about any “given” subject, the less certain you become of the common knowledge dispensed about it, and sometimes you do a complete 180, realizing that the traditional take on a historical moment is just not true. That’s where Truth v. Myth comes from, and that’s what we’re looking at here.

American isolationism is a tricky topic. Generally, the cult of American isolationism has been built on these cornerstones: the lack of political action taken against Germany by the U.S. government until war was declared; Americans’ over-arching concern with the domestic economy during the Depression, which precluded any real or sustained interest in foreign affairs; and Roosevelt’s struggles to get Congress to authorize material support for Britain from 1940-1941.

The first and last of these concerns official government action; the second addresses the man in the street. They are often connected by saying, The man in the street did not want war with Germany and so the government tried to stay out of it. Only when Pearl Harbor was attacked did Americans rise up and demand war, and so Congress declared it.

But it’s clear when you study the U.S. in the interwar period that there was no single, national opinion on Europe and whether to intervene in German policy. The majority of Americans were concerned about what was happening in Germany; the increasingly oppressive and criminal policies the Nazi government introduced from the start of its rule in March 1933 were fully covered in the U.S. press, and that coverage alarmed and angered many Americans. More Americans had ancestors from Germany than from any other European nation, so millions of German-Americans were outraged at what they considered to be the Nazi destruction of German culture and civilization. Other Americans worried that Germany would provoke another war in Europe—not simply because they didn’t want the U.S. to fight another war, but because the struggling U.S. economy needed a strong European export market. Communist and Socialist Americans were united with Democrats and Republicans in decrying the rise of fascist dictatorship. And Jewish Americans spread the word of the growing persecution of Jewish Germans through every available outlet.

So we see that there was a great deal of concern and anger about the Reich and its policies, and there was also real activism against Nazi Germany. Jewish Americans led the way, in particular Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, who organized an anti-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1933 that drew 25,000 attendees. In the depths of the Depression, Wise called for an economic boycott against Nazi Germany that was supported by the American Federation of Labor and the International Trade Union Congress as well as the Jewish Labor Committee. The determination to isolate and attack Nazi Germany thus cut across religious lines.

Why didn’t the U.S. government act against the Nazis if so many Americans were against Germany? That is a very complex topic for another post (and has been addressed in many books), but suffice it to say, for here, that there were several factors at play: the government did not want to provoke another war if there was a diplomatic solution; the government did not receive any real support from any European nation for ostracizing Nazi Germany; and, significantly, the government, like most governments in Europe, simply did not believe that a government so oppressive, so cartoonish, so ridiculous and unstable, could possible last very long. Just as the Founders wrote slavery protections into our Constitution because they felt certain that slavery could not possible endure for very long in our democracy, so the U.S. (and Europe) continued to maintain as normal a relationship as possible with Nazi Germany, certain that it would quickly fall apart or be destroyed by an uprising of the German people.

In the meanwhile, Americans who also could not believe the Nazi regime would last did not ignore the growing threat. Local newspapers in big cities and small towns published the criminal actions of the German government. Many people with relatives in Germany worked to get them out of that country. Jewish Americans continually broadcast details of the emerging Holocaust. And, as we’ll see in the next post, there was an extraordinary demonstration against Hitler on March 7, 1934, that infuriated Germany and impacted relations with the U.S.

Next time: Hitler on trial in Manhattan

Double Indemnity: Bits of America in 1944

It seems that each December we look at a movie here at the HP, beginning with the 2008 defenestration of the horrid Bing Crosby movie Holiday Inn. This year we turn our attention to Double Indemnity, the classic 1944 movie starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. There’s no moral problem with DI; we’re taking a look here at the interesting and intriguing glimpses into everyday life in the U.S. in the 1940s that it provides.

One must admit to turning it on about a third of the way in, so that’s where our comments begin.

The two main characters, Walter and Phyllis, are plotting to murder Phyllis’ husband. They meet in a Los Angeles grocery store—the big new market, according to Walter. It’s interesting that it’s not a chain: “Jerry’s Market” is written on the outside in cursive signage. The next decade would see the birth of the chain-store era. This grocery store is fascinating. There seemed to be no produce at all at Jerry’s. Everything, but everything, was in boxes or cans, and all of the boxes and cans are white with black letters. I didn’t see a single picture on any packaging, which certainly is not representative of packaging in general at the time—we all know the lovely, full-color images that were the mainstay of advertising from the late 19th-century on (and which are so popular as poster art today). Perhaps Jerry’s black-and-white world was a sign of daring modernity in 1944.

The signs on the isles that I could see were: CAND BEANS, CAND MILK, DRY BEANS, BABY FOOD, and MACARONI. Beyond the unusual abbreviation of “canned”, which I haven’t seen anywhere else, I was intrigued to see that the macaroni aisle was half bags, half cans. I have never seen canned macaroni, but it reminds me of a movie from the late 1930s I saw wherein a character said she was running to the market for a can of potato salad.

Each one of these items takes up an entire aisle; I have never seen an entire aisle of a grocery store, even a large one, devoted entirely to canned beans or baby food or any other single item. In the second grocery-store scene a store worker appears with a feather duster, dusting all the cans and boxes. Another store worker is seen with a large cart with a crate on it that is overflowing with black-and-white cans, ready to stock the shelves.

One last note on the grocer’s is that of course Walter smokes the whole time he’s in Jerry’s Market.

Interesting housing notes: Walter refers to “my apartment house”, which makes me wonder when people stopped adding “house”; and Phyllis’ mansion has an enormous garage door that slides open horizontally on a track, which I’ve never seen, and moves smoothly enough to be opened with one hand.

Personal notes: Walter, a bachelor, wears a large gold band on his wedding ring finger. I know that wearing a wedding ring on the left-hand ring finger is a very new tradition in the U.S., mostly cemented at exactly this time: WWII. When men went to war, their wives or girlfriends or fiancees wanted a symbol of their commitment, both to ward off other men and to show their pride and love. Thus the engagement ring was born, and the wedding ring became universally accepted. So it’s odd that Walter is wearing a ring on that finger, and not a seal or class ring but a very wedding-type band.

Phyllis shows up at Walter’s office wearing a mourning veil after she helps kill her husband, and every time she speaks or exhales the fabric puffs out; the hazards of wearing a veil. Finally, when Walter takes Phyllis’ step-daughter for a fun jaunt at the beach, he is wearing a full suit and tie and hat, and she is wearing a dress suit. Back to the days when formal wear was rarely inappropriate.

Miscellaneous: When Walter’s boss is listing all the data they have on suicides, he says they have data “by race, by color…”. Clearly the antebellum distinctions between people whose skin was one “color” but whose race was defined by the old alchemy of percentages (what “percent” black or Asian or Native American or Eastern European, etc., you were compared to what percentage white) were still in play.

Finally, if you haven’t heard Fred MacMurray, who will always be remembered by most people as the affable, a-sexual father on My Three Sons, grind out the words “Shut up, baby” before he kisses a woman… you are probably well-off.

Until next December!

Child labor in the U.S. during the Industrial Revolution

Following up on our earlier post on child labor in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries, we consider how any child who worked 12-hour days 6 days a week experiencing ungodly levels of air and noise pollution; financial, physical, and often sexual exploitation; fatigue, hunger, and illness or injury lived to tell the tale. What got children through this sort of life?

One leavening factor was that the child usually worked alongside family members. This meant the child worker could share food with someone, had company, and knew someone at work spoke and understood her language if she hadn’t learned English yet. Another was that, as we described in the first post, most of these children expected to work like adults, and were proud of their ability to contribute to the family economy. They weren’t snatched from a happy childhood of school and play and thrown into the factory; they were born to work and in some sense could not fully miss what they never had.

But the most important factor in America was that child laborers and their families believed their days in the factory might be numbered—in America, land of opportunity, one could reasonably hope to work one’s way up from the factory floor. If a boy worked hard, learned English, and stayed alive, he could become the floor manager or boss. If he was really sharp, he could become a white-collar assistant manager. A girl hoped to work only until she got married—if she was smart and lucky, she might marry an overseer and retire to a life of non-factory work (working from home as a seamstress, laundress, or hat-maker, for example). If she was very lucky, she could marry one of those white-collar managers and never work again.

The promise of rising up, even entering the middle class, white-collar world after a relatively brief if truly hellish few years on the factory floor drove many child workers, and gave them the mental fortitude to make it through the factory work day. This was their parents’ hope, too. And even if a child worker never progressed past overseer, his own children might do better, and then a grandchild might end up going to school and being a doctor or lawyer. That was the promise that didn’t exist for most immigrants in their “old country”. American exacted a toll, but it offered a payoff.

Even children who labored without hope of their own advancement did it for a sibling; stories abound of siblings working slavishly to pay for one smart, usually younger brother to go to school and even college. If that one brother made it, he could relieve the sufferings of his whole family. Many a young girl worked tirelessly to give her brother a better life, and dreamed of the day his success would allow her retirement from the machine floor.

So there was a powerful psychological impetus for many of the children who worked in factories during this period, namely the belief that it would pay off one day and they would no longer have to work so hard, even if it was a brother or son who eventually made a life of relative leisure possible. That was the promise of America.

As we turn our throughts back to today’s child laborers, most of whom are basically enslaved in cotton fields or gold mines, we see there is no promise of a payoff of any kind motivating their labor—just fear and hopelessness. One story about the children who are enslaved to work in “fair trade” cotton fields in Burkina Faso we heard today actually made the claim that the farmers there who beat children almost to death for not picking enough cotton don’t know that that is wrong because “no one has told them it’s wrong”. We think Clarisse Kambire, shown here, knows that it’s wrong:

Clarisse Kambire, 13, a child laborer, poses for a photograph in the room where she sleeps in Benvar, Burkina Faso, on Friday, Nov. 11, 2011. In Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world, where child labor is endemic to the production of its chief crop export, paying lucrative premiums for organic and fair traden cotton has — perversely — created fresh incentives for exploitation. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images

And so we will state that it’s impossible that any adult could “not understand” the injustice of child labor, the inhumanity of child slave labor, and the crime of beating child workers. Bosses and plantation farmers in the U.S. in the 1800s knew it was wrong to exploit children; they just also knew that no one would stop them from exploiting those children, and therefore they did it. Everyone, everywhere, knows that this is wrong. More power to those who are working around the world, and in the U.S., to try to stop child labor once and for all.

Why was there child labor in America?

The stories in the news recently on child labor in gold mines in Mali remind us that, although it has been outlawed in many countries, child labor is not a thing of the past. We are shocked here in the U.S. to read about six year-olds being forced to work in factories, or in gold mines, using mercury and other poisons, and wonder how anyone could do that to children. We are shocked and dismayed to read about child labor in our own country—not just the child labor that continues today, under the radar, but more particularly the fully sanctioned, completely legal exploitation of young children that fueled our Industrial Revolution in the 19th and well into the 20th centuries.

Photos of child labor in American factories like this one are typical, yet still powerfully able to stir one’s revulsion:

child labor

We’re all pretty familiar with the dangers children like these faced, from the machines they basically stood inside of to run to their overseers, who were free to exercise brutality without qualm. What’s less clear, and not very often explored, is how and why the parents of these children let them work in these terrible conditions, and how any child survived the experience physically or emotionally.

If we look at child workers in the 19th and 20th centuries in the U.S., we see that they were predominately urban, and that the majority of urban child workers were immigrants or children of immigrants. There was child labor in textile mills in rural towns, of course, and black children were forced to work as sharecroppers, putting in 12-hour days with their parents. In all of these cases, children worked for one simple reason: they had to. For their families to survive financially, everyone who was able had to work. Women went back to work one or two days after giving birth. Men worked when they were fatally ill or injured. And children worked when they should have been in school, or playing. They all did this because, whether they were immigrants who had spent their last dime (as it were) getting to America and paying rent on a tenement apartment, or whether they were the children of former slaves who had their freedom but nothing else (no land, no money, no education or opportunity for any of these), or whether they were poor rural whites in much the same position as black sharecroppers, these people were on the brink of annihilation. They were in debt, one step away from deportation, the poorhouse, the orphanage, or worse. Everyone had to work to give the family the smallest scrap of security, the flimsiest safety net.

The way to the 12-hour factory day for 7 year-olds was paved with precedent. Children (except for wealthy children) had always worked. Most Americans were farmers, and so children worked on the family farm. This was hard work with long hours, but it was overseen by caring parents who had every incentive of love and practicality to keep their children safe, and not force them to do jobs that were too hard for them. The whole family worked long hours together, and shared in the wealth they created. This was true of most immigrant families in their homelands, too.

As the Industrial Revolution developed, the ratio of urban to rural families shifted very significantly very quickly, but what did not change was the tradition of children working. Now children in large numbers worked in shops or on the streets as bootblacks, cart vendors, newsboys, gutter cleaners, etc. They worked in the first sweatshops—family apartments where everyone sewed, made shoes, or did laundry, etc., for 10 hours a day, six days a week. And, eventually, they worked in factories, sometimes the same factories as their parents.

Labor unrest helped this process along, as factory owners looked for workers who could not organize labor unions and strike for fair wages and safe working conditions. Immigrants who didn’t speak English and/or had no experience with democracy were a good choice, but these men were quickly educated in both once in America. Children, on the other hand, were ideal: they had no legal rights, they didn’t have to be paid even half what an adult earned, and their wages could be given directly to their parents, thus preventing children from understanding what their labor was worth. Children could also be horribly abused without any legal repercussions (see children having no legal rights), and they were small enough to reach into (running) machinery to fix small pieces. In short, children were ideal factory workers, and the tradition of children working eased the transition from family farm work to factory labor.

Next time: how child laborers in the U.S. coped

The Boston Tea Party: what does it mean today?

Part the last of our series on the Boston Tea Party considers its legacy in U.S. history, memory, and mind. With the rise of the Tea Party political party after the 2008 presidential election, this question of the meaning of the original act of protest is particularly important.

We’ve seen in this series that the original Tea Party (which was not called by that name, incidentally, until decades after the fact) sprang from a complicated and not very appealing tradition of using physical violence to achieve political goals. The governor of Massachusetts himself, Thomas Hutchinson, was forced to flee for his life with his wife and children in 1765 when a mob destroyed his home—literally ripping it to pieces—in protest of the Stamp Act. The men of Boston who supported the Body of the People carried out many attacks on tea commissioner’s homes, families, and persons in the months before the night of the Tea Party, attacks which we cannot approve of today. Using violence to get people to do what you want, especially in the name of justice, is the polar opposite of democracy, the representative democracy the U.S. is founded on. None of us would want to see mobs of people burning down the homes and businesses of people whose policies they didn’t approve of.

But we also see that patriot leaders in Boston realized that mob violence was not a long-term solution to Americans’ problems with British rule, and that it would not work as a political tool. Men like Samuel Adams and John Hancock knew that their goal—democratic self-rule—had to be based on civil political debate, freedom of conscience and speech, and rule of law. A war would have to be fought, perhaps, to gain independence, but after that rule of law must win the day.

That’s why the men who rallied the common people to protest were not the ones who ended up drafting the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. John Adams, not Samuel Adams; Thomas Jefferson, not Paul Revere: the men who enshrined rule of law through representative democracy were ones untainted by association with violence (except for John Hancock, an exception which proves the rule). So we can think of the Tea Party as the last act of colonial mob violence before the inauguration of the era of American democracy.

Today the Tea Party has become a synonym for “no taxes”, but we have seen that the protest against the tea was not a protest against the principle of taxation. It was a protest against a) taxation without representation, and b) taxes levied simply to fund government, with no benefits accruing to the people being taxed. No one wants to pay taxes that go only to fund the office of tax collection. Taxes are meant to better society, to provide services to those who can’t afford them on their own, not to entrench the government’s power to tax. The men who organized the Tea Party, the men who carried out the destruction of the tea, the women who boycotted tea even when they considered it vital to their families’ health all did so to establish the ideal of taxation for the general welfare. Warping that democratic goal by saying that all of those people actually wanted no taxation, that they didn’t want their money going to anyone else no matter what, is a cynical and unacceptable lie.

Let’s remember the Tea Party as it was: a gauntlet thrown down to set in motion the necessary violence of a war for independence that would, if successful, create a society where violence had no part in politics, and taxation represented a bit of freedom and justice for all.

What happened at the Boston Tea Party?

Part 4 of our series on the Boston Tea Party examines the protest itself. We looked last time at the tradition of violence in Boston, which would lead us—and people at the time—to believe that the final protest against the tea waiting in Boston Harbor to be unloaded according to the terms of the Tea Act would be bloody. The people of Boston were exasperated by their battles with the British government over tea, and, as Thomas Jefferson said, “An exasperated people, who feel that they possess power, are not easily restrained within limits strictly regular.”

But the Tea Party itself was not violent. Here’s how it played out. Like our earlier posts, this one is deeply endebted to Benjamin Carp’s fantastic book Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (from which the Jefferson quote comes).

Patriot protesters had developed the habit of gathering at the Old South Meeting House in Boston, where they heard speeches by patriot leaders like Samuel Adams and John Hancock. They called themselves “the Body of the People”, and they had no official power over the colonial legislature but they were the real power in town. Their meetings were important for two reasons: first, they presented a powerful threat to the Loyalist governor, tax officials, and tea commissioners. Because the Body was not elected, the governor could not control it by dismissing its members. Second, the leaders of the Body realized that, if talk and diplomacy failed, the Body could continue to make public statements of diplomacy and non-violence while authorizing certain of its members to take bolder action on the side.

So the Body passed a resolution saying that “the use of Tea is improper and pernicious,” a relatively mild and impotent statement that they hoped official town meetings would honor and turn into law, thus putting pressure on Boston and the governor… while certain of its members cried out “informally” that they would haul the tea ships up from the Harbor to Boston Common and burn them right there [Carp 120]. Members of the Body cheered, but its prudent leaders did not record this sentiment in the official minutes.

Thus when the last political effort to get the tea sent back to England failed, the Body officially dropped the matter. The hundreds of men gathered in Old South heard the leaders officially abandon the attempt to turn back the tea. And then they began to melt away, slipping out the back exits into the night. Fifteen minutes later, the room was surprised by troops of Mohawks with axes.

Of course, these men had met amongst themselves beforehand to decide what course of action to take if the tea ships could not be turned away and sent out of the harbor. Since we cannot name many men with certainty as perpetrators of the Tea Party, it’s hard to get a lot of data on how they decided on throwing the tea into the harbor (since, as we saw, other protests were suggested, including burning the tea). But once the plan of boarding the ships and destroying the tea was hatched, things moved quickly. “They determined that it would take a few dozen men with knowledge of how to unload a ship, and so the men who signed on for the task included a mix of traders and craftsmen. Each man would disguise himself as an Indian and swear an oath of secrecy… Everyone agreed on the ground rules: no one would steal or vandalize any property except the tea itself, and not one would commit any violence or mayhem. If the destroyers worked quickly and efficiently, the job would only take two or three hours” [Carp 117].

As these men now gathered back at Old South, the Body tacitly approved what it knew was going to happen. One man remembered that the last thing he heard before heading for the wharf was John Hancock shouting “Let every man do what is right in his own eyes!”

Once at the ships, the men worked like professionals. The commissioners occupying each ship were identified and told to leave on peril of death. They did so. One Captain Bruce asked what the men were going to do. He was told the plan and ordered below decks with his men, and told they would not be harmed. They did so. [Carp 127] Then the Mohawks expertly hauled the tea out of the holds, working very quickly considering the huge weight of the tea chests. They knocked off the bindings, smashed the chests, and threw them overboard. Despite the allure of the tea, and the price it would bring in the morning, only two men attempted to steal any. They were instantly stripped of their clothes and beaten, and sent on their way.

The men made as little noise as possible. This was not the raucous rioting of Pope’s Day or the attacks on the tea commissioners’ homes. This was business, and it had to be done and done quickly before any soldiers discovered the men. It was imperative that the tea be destroyed, because if it was not it would be unloaded the next morning and it would be impossible to stop its distribution, and then Boston would be the town that let the Patriot cause down after the successful rejections and boycotts in New York and Philadelphia.

By 8:00 or 9:00 PM, the party was over. Everyone went home quietly and followed orders to turn out their pants cuffs and socks and shoes and sweep any tea leaves gathered there into the fireplace. In all, about 92,000 pounds of tea—over 46 tons—had been destroyed [Carp 139].

Reaction was swift. The Tea Party was a complete rejection of British rule. Anything less than a severe punishment would be condoning rebellion. That punishment came in the form of the Coercive Acts: the port of Boston was closed to commercial shipping, ruining its economy; Boston was to recompense the East India Company for the total value of the lost tea; the Massachusetts Government Act set in motion the destruction of the popularly elected General Court (all positions in the colonial government would now be appointed by the king); the Administration of Justice act moved trials of government officials to other colonies or to England; and the Quartering Act made housing British soldiers mandatory for all citizens.

Boston had been acting in concert with New York and Philadelphia, but it bore the brunt of the King’s wrath all on its own. It’s no surprise, then, that the Revolution was kindled in the hearth of Massachusetts. Next time, we’ll wrap the series up with reflections on the meaning and impact of the Tea Party today.

Next time: What does the Tea Party mean today?