from the NYT
...
Class inequality has surged into the view of American politics in recent
years, but this isn’t the first bout of class violence this country has
seen. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when 12-hour working
days were common and child labor legal and federal minimum wages
nonexistent, neither political party offered meaningful relief, pressing
the working class to the wall. Violence — sabotage, dynamite,
assassinations — ensued.
But there’s a key difference. In that
earlier era, the anarchists and trade unionists who committed acts of
violence did so, however rashly, in the hopes of affecting change. What
is more, there were labor organizations and political movements
committed to bringing about better conditions for working-class people.
In time, they achieved at least some of these goals.
Today’s
class violence lacks logic; it seems only animated by revenge,
resentment and despair. There is no conspiracy or political
mobilization. The people committing these acts are acting alone. The
very fact of their isolation hints at a society that is beginning to
abandon the hope of transformation.
While the extreme concentration
of wealth today may echo the dawn of industrial capitalism, the
conditions of class confrontation then were profoundly different. Then,
the workplace itself was extremely dangerous: Thousands of workers died
in industrial accidents annually in the early decades of the 20th
century. The police and National Guardsmen came in to break strikes,
while companies hired private militias to prevent workers from
organizing.
Radical workers responded with violence of their own, instilling great
fear among the elites of the day. In the coal fields of Western
Pennsylvania, Irish miners killed at least 14 mine officials over the
course of the 1860s and 1870s. When the Western Federation of Miners
sought to organize in 1899, union supporters used dynamite to destroy
company property. The governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, imprisoned
about a thousand workers in response. In 1905, after leaving office, a
bomb killed him at his home. Union leader William Haywood was among
those charged (a member of the miners’ union had confessed to the crime
and implicated union leadership; a jury found Haywood not guilty).
President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901 by an anarchist who
had lost his job during an economic crash. Two union members dynamited
the offices of The Los Angeles Times, widely seen as hostile to
organized labor, in 1910...
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