It Ain’t So, Joe (2): The Pittsburgh Field Trip
The June 14 Clarion-Ledger reported that, on a recent trip to Pittsburgh, labor columnist Joe Atkins discovered – I’ll bet you can guess – capitalist exploitation of workers. Joe expressed hope that his outrage will be shared by protestors at this September’s G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh. But Joe wasn’t writing about today’s steel or coal industry. Joe was excoriating monopolists who owned American steel mills and coal mines in the late nineteenth century – more than a century ago.
The wise men who wrote our Constitution enumerated, divided and opposed government powers principally to forestall tyranny. But though one who has monopolized economic power is nearly as much a tyrant as one who has monopolized political power, we had no significant private sector anti-monopoly law until 1896.
Before then, barely a generation after Congress outlawed slavery, our industrial monopolists often behaved badly. Steelworkers’ and coal miners’ work was dirty and dangerous and wages were cut to gain market share and to weather downturns, though not, as Joe suggests, just for the fun of it. When locked-out steelworkers seized U.S. Steel’s Homestead Works in 1892, ten union gunmen and a similar number of Pinkertons were killed in a shootout as the Pinkertons sought to re-enter the mill. Joe overdid it a bit by calling the union gunmen martyrs – the word honors one killed for holy or righteous work – but the Homestead workers clearly had been provoked. In due, though deliberate course, anti-monopoly and labor laws followed.
If one stares into such events – indeed, any circumstance of human degradation and destruction – hard enough, long enough, and to the exclusion of all else, indignation and outrage surely will follow. Capitalism’s worst excess, monopoly, is no exception to this rule. But our monopolists were very petty offenders compared to the icons of socialism, who murdered millions to serve the system, if not personal whims. And some bad things – for example, a dirty, dangerous steel mill job – are nevertheless improvements upon the cruel, brutish and short life one has fled. It was, on average, much better to be an American coal miner or steelworker in 1892 than to be a serf – so much better that millions of Europeans and Asians risked everything to travel here just to grasp the bottom rung of our economy.
So, instead of wishing riots on Pittsburgh’s upcoming G-20 meeting, all thoughtful Americans should focus on those who today, in America, seek to abuse and expand their monopoly powers. Almost all of them are in government. They fight public charter schools. They nationalize industries. They seek to nationalize health care. And, oh yes, they want to deprive workers of their right to select labor union representatives by secret ballot. May we continue to have the good sense to prefer choice, competition and capitalism.
Pepper Crutcher submission to YallPolitics
6/15/9
Magnolia Tribune
