People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [144]
The dangers of mill work intensified efforts to organize. Work often went on around the clock. At a mill in Providence, Rhode Island, fire broke out one night in 1866. There was panic among the six hundred workers, mostly women, and many jumped to their deaths from upper-story windows.
In Fall River, Massachusetts, women weavers formed a union independent of the men weavers. They refused to take a 10 percent wage cut that the men had accepted, struck against three mills, won the men’s support, and brought to a halt 3,500 looms and 156,000 spindles, with 3,200 workers on strike. But their children needed food; they had to return to work, signing an “iron-clad oath” (later called a “yellow-dog contract”) not to join a union.
Black workers at this time found the National Labor Union reluctant to organize them. So they formed their own unions and carried on their own strikes—like the levee workers in Mobile, Alabama, in 1867, Negro longshoremen in Charleston, dockworkers in Savannah. This probably stimulated the National Labor Union, at its 1869 convention, to resolve to organize women and Negroes, declaring that it recognized “neither color nor sex on the question of the rights of labor.” A journalist wrote about the remarkable signs of racial unity at this convention:
When a native Mississippian and an ex-confederate officer, in addressing a convention, refers to a colored delegate who has preceded him as “the gentleman from Georgia” . . . when an ardent and Democratic partisan (from New York at that) declares with a rich Irish brogue that he asks for himself no privilege as a mechanic or as a citizen that he is not willing to concede to every other man, white or black . . . then one may indeed be warranted in asserting that time works curious changes. . . .
Most unions, however, still kept Negroes out, or asked them to form their own locals.
The National Labor Union began to expend more and more of its energy on political issues, especially currency reform, a demand for the issuance of paper money: Greenbacks. As it became less an organizer of labor struggles, and more a lobbyist with Congress, concerned with voting, it lost vitality. An observer of the labor scene, F. A. Sorge, wrote in 1870 to Karl Marx in England: “The National Labor Union, which had such brilliant prospects in the beginning of its career, was poisoned by Greenbackism and is slowly but surely dying.”
Perhaps unions could not easily see the limits to legislative reform in an age where such reform laws were being passed for the first time, and hopes were high. The Pennsylvania legislature in 1869 passed a mine safety act providing for the “regulation and ventilation of mines, and for the protection of the lives of the miners.” Only after a hundred years of continuing accidents in those mines would it be understood how insufficient those words were—except as a device to calm anger among miners.
In 1873, another economic crisis devastated the nation. It was the closing of the banking house of Jay Cooke—the banker who during the war had made $3 million a year in commissions alone for selling government bonds—that started the wave of panic. While President Grant slept in Cooke’s Philadelphia mansion on September 18, 1873, the banker rode downtown to lock the door on his bank. Now people could not pay loans on mortgages: five thousand businesses closed and put their workers on the street.
It was more than Jay Cooke. The crisis was built into a system which was chaotic in its nature, in which only the very rich were secure. It was a system of periodic crisis—1837, 1857, 1873 (and later: 1893, 1907, 1919, 1929)—that wiped out small businesses and brought cold,