158 Gilded Age immigrants began arriving in the 1880s Farmers and laborers in the predominantly agricultural West and South agitated against exploitative railroads and condemned currency and trade policies that kept them in debt The Gilded Age’s first major upheaval was the Great Railroad Strike that erupted in 1877, the fourth year of a major recession Starting that July in Baltimore, where the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Company had imposed a 10 percent pay cut on workers, the strike spread to rail yards across the nation It was the first coast-to-coast strike in U.S history At first, the strikers were hailed by other workers and local people also fed up with railroad practices But President Rutherford B Hayes, provoked by some acts of worker violence, soon called out federal troops to protect railroad property A hundred people, mostly strikers, died Government intervention against workers on behalf of corporations became a hallmark of Gilded Age labor relations An 1886 strike against Chicago’s McCormick Reaper Company also resulted in bloodshed and fears of mounting social disorder blamed on anarchist ideas percolating out of Europe At Haymarket Square, where workers were protesting police violence that had killed four McCormick strikers, a bomb exploded, killing a policeman Police raided radical and labor organizations and arrested eight anarchists On little evidence, all eight, including six German and one English immigrant, were convicted of the bombing, and four were hanged Five months later in New York, the Statue of Liberty, France’s salute to the promise of American freedom, was ceremoniously unveiled The upsurge in union militancy was accompanied by a rising tide of local and national political organizing The relatively egalitarian Knights of Labor played major roles in the railroad and McCormick strikes, but lost ground to the better organized American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded in 1886 and focused on achieving the eight-hour day Traditional farmer organizations, like the Grange, became more outspoken In the 1880s the Greenback-Labor Party twice fielded presidential candidates in an effort to change monetary policies unfavorable to farmers It was a precursor to populism’s Peoples Party a few years later GILDED AGE CRITICS Even people like William Graham Sumner, America’s apostle of Social Darwinism, knew that much was amiss in his society Although opposed to government meddling, Sumner was a moralist who distinguished between honest and productive capitalists, who used their power for greater good, and plutocrats who corruptly worked the political system to steal special privileges for themselves Other critics of his era were ready to go much farther These included social observers with alternate political agendas, critics who zeroed in on specific examples of corruption and injustice, and a host of utopian writers, many of whom imagined perfected societies in which people and their marvelous machines always behaved properly Henry George was a California newspaper editor who lost his labor-union-backed bid to become New York City’s mayor in 1886 In a best-selling book, Progress and Poverty, first published in 1879, George laid out a plan he called the “single tax.” This tax on land, George believed, would assure that all Americans could own some land by preventing the wealthy and powerful from buying up too much property It was a sort of freesoil promise for urban dwellers that avoided socialistic solutions to the nation’s inequities Single-tax societies sprang up across the nation In some big city churches, ministers like Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch worked with labor unions to develop programs to aid the poor and immigrants with better health care, housing, and help for the unemployed A counterattack on the tenets of Social Darwinism, this Social Gospel movement was a predecessor of Progressivism Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant newspaperman, used photography to reveal problems in Gilded Age society His New York City photos and commentary collected in the 1890 book How the Other Half Lives showed successful middle-class urbanites what was happening to the ignored or abused “other half”—unwashed, untutored, miserable, and much to the consternation of the comfortable middle class, possibly ready to rise up in anger The Gilded Age brought forth a torrent of utopian fiction, foreseeing battles between rich and poor ending in social cataclysm or even America’s total destruction The most influential and positive of the utopians was Edward Bellamy, a Massachusetts writer, whose bestselling Looking Backward: 2000–1887 came out in 1888 Awaking in a perfectly clean, calm, and prosperous Boston, Bellamy’s hero learns how America overcame the evils it was experiencing in the 19th century by introducing marvelous new machines and assuring all citizens enough of what they need and work tailored to their abilities Bellamy Societies sprang up across the country as people argued the merits of his vision Although there is some dispute about when the Gilded Age ended, the depression of 1893–97, the emer-