An Excerpt From Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America

By Scott Gac

The Great Strikes of 1877 are recognized as a significant example of forceful labor protest in the United States. But, if we only look at what the workers did, we miss the important role of the state and state-backed violence in controlling workers and supporting the growth of American industrial capitalism. And it is this revolution of industrial capitalism, a revolution of contracts, wages, and courts backed by federal, state, and local force, that workers resisted during the Great Strikes. The following excerpt from Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America details how Social Darwinism helped buttress worker suppression in the post-Civil War era and how, in 1874, the brutal treatment of peaceful working-class protesters in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park foreshadowed the militant response to workers seen three years later in the Great Strikes.

Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America
by Scott Gac
Cambridge University Press
January 2024, 356 pp.

“‘What is meant by ‘survival of the fittest?’ asked a Chicago reader. ‘It is the theory that the strongest – those best adapted to living – survive the weaker in the struggle of life,’ replied the editor at the Inter Ocean. In fact, Social Darwinist adherents promoted the social theories of Herbert Spencer – theories that Charles Darwin, the biologist, never proposed. They upheld the idea that society was a contest, and that the contest took place in an equitable setting… [1]

… [However,] most members of workers’ communities – or supporters of them – disputed the validity of such talk. They did not believe that the outcome of struggle, especially that of government force over strikers, justified the current disposition of American life. That ‘the fittest survive and move forward in every craft,’ said an Indiana letter writer, ‘we emphatically deny, for it is paramount to saying that he who is promoted is worthy, and he who is not is not worthy.’ The writer continued, ‘Man is more a creature of circumstance than he is successful by will or rule.’ The circumstance that explained the 1877 strikes, the African American industrial paper Southern Workman later explained, was the deployment of federal force – ‘the abnormal extention of the powers of the national government’ – and ‘a general decay and dissolution of the local communities.’ The paper asserted that greed – ‘the new thirst and passion for wealth’ – sat at the foundation of the troubles. For it was greedy capitalists and state-backed violence that fostered the Social Darwinists’ dream. Life was made ‘a struggle, not with the powers of nature to obtain the means of subsistence and comfort, which is the normal life for all men, but a struggle of men with each other in which an ever-increasing number must inevitably fail and be crushed.’ [2]

By the 1870s, workers were familiar with capitalism’s crush. Armed citizens, police, private armies, and state and federal soldiers repeatedly delivered it to silence working-class complaint. The democratic impulse of workers, which looked for governments more responsive to the wants and needs of those at the bottom, met the autocratic response of corporate leaders, which looked to control government and retain the privileges of capital for those on top. In New York City in 1874, for instance, only three years before the Great Strikes and just four months into the economic Panic, peaceful protests of the unemployed flourished. With some hundred thousand laborers out of work, city parks served as rallying points. The workers and their families assembled to ask for government-led job opportunities (in the form of public works programs) and a variety of protections like halting wintertime evictions for the unemployed, improving child labor laws, banning convict labor for private businesses, and placing railroads, telegraphs, and canals under national or state control. As seven thousand men, women, and children prepared to gather in Tompkins Square Park on January 13, however, city leaders decided they had heard enough. On the evening of the 12th, officials revoked the demonstration’s permit. The next day, the marchers were therefore declared criminals –not only in the legal sense owing to the event proceeding without proper authorization, but in a social sense: they were poor, and many were immigrants. Arriving at the park fully armed, 1,600 city policemen, without adequate warning, began to beat and arrest them. Mounted units chased workers through the streets. The future labor leader Samuel Gompers, then a twenty-four-year-old cigar maker, called the police action in the park ‘an orgy of brutality.’ [3]

New York City Mayor William Frederick Havemeyer, a reporter noted, expressed pity for the conditions of the ‘poor men who showed that they were willing to work.’ Yet he ‘did not approve of their using threatening and intimidating language.’ Workers’ words, then, justified the city’s armed response, and the ‘emergency’ – the large collections of workmen in public spaces – required police action ‘to protect the city against any excesses which some mischievous men among them might be led to commit.’ In addition, Havemeyer found the protesting workers ‘crazy,’ too easily influenced by communist foreigners. ‘Nothing else could have been done,’ he said of the police maneuvers. ‘Nothing better could have happened.’ [4]

In a speech at the Cooper Institute, the German-American activist Augusta Lilienthal displayed a keen grasp of the situation’s dynamic. The city had promoted fiscal concerns in the name of social order and security, but, she wondered, what about democracy? ‘The constitution afforded them [the workers] the right of free speech, but the police robbed them of the right.’ Law and order had triumphed over worker protest. This trend extended beyond security tactics and was soon emboldened by new legislation. After an 1876 strike on the Boston and Maine railroad, for instance, Massachusetts lawmakers made the endangerment of business interests by striking a punishable offense. Seven states prohibited train engineers from vacating their position ‘at any place other than the scheduled’ destination. Capitalism, it seemed, demanded safekeeping from laborers and their public remonstrations. [5]

Scott Gac is an author, historian, and teacher. At Trinity College in Connecticut, he is a Professor of History and American Studies. His book Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America (Cambridge University Press, 2024) is based on his popular lecture course of the same name. His first book, Singing for Freedom (Yale Press, 2007), details interracial social activism of the pre-Civil War era through the abolitionist musicians, the Hutchinson Family Singers. Professor Gac is a graduate of Columbia University, The Juilliard School, and The Graduate Center at CUNY.

[1] D. to Editor, 30 July 1877, “The Weekly Budget of Queries from the Readers,” Inter Ocean [Chicago], 18 Aug. 1877, 12. “Sober Second Thoughts,” Clarksville Weekly Chronicle [TN], 4 Aug. 1877, 1.

[2] Letter to the Editor, “All Are Workingmen,” Indianapolis Sentinel, 4 Aug. 1877, 7. J. B. Harrison, “Notes on Industrial Conditions” in “A Most Valuable Contribution,” Southern Workman and Hampton School Record, 15.8 (1 Aug. 1886), 85–86.

[3] For Tompkins Square, see Herbert G. Gutman, “The Tompkins Square ‘Riot’ in New York City on January 13, 1874: A Re-examination of its Causes and its Aftermath,” Labor History, 6:1 (1965), 44–70. Gompers in Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 32.

[4] Reporter on Havemeyer in “The Workingmen’s Demonstrations,” New York Herald, 9 Jan. 1875, 5. “Mayor Havemeyer and the Laborers,” New Orleans Republican, 14 Jan. 1874, 1. For more protests, see, for example, “Out of Work,” New York Herald, 6 Jan. 1874, 5. Havemeyer cited in “The Workingmen Right,” New York Herald, 15 Jan. 1874, 5.

[5] Lilienthal in “Free Speech: German Mass Meeting at the Cooper Institute,” New York Herald, 31 Jan 1874, 3. Quote on laws in Foner, Great Labor Uprising, 33. Eggert, Railroad Labor Disputes, 41.