The Struggle for America's Promise by Claire Goldstene

Author:Claire Goldstene [Goldstene, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 19th Century, Political Science, History & Theory, Business & Economics, Labor, General
ISBN: 9781626741355
Google: CfwaBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Published: 2014-04-17T04:14:18+00:00

The federation’s conferences and activities illuminate the constraints imposed by the ideology of equal opportunity and illustrate various attempts to reconcile large-scale industrial production to these ideals. In the course of doing so, discourses about opportunity shifted from small-scale entrepreneurship to a linking of interests through an alleged expansion of stock ownership to a broad public. By this reasoning, Jay Gould explained in 1883, that “a corporation is only another name for the means which we have discovered of allowing a poor man to invest his income in a great enterprise.”18 Such arrangements effectively divorced the control of productive property from ownership.

Further, in contrast to traditional ideas about opportunity rooted in economic independence and centered on owning a business, land, or one’s labor, effort would now be rewarded with internal advancement or the payment of dividends in pursuit of greater leisure and increased consumption. Such a recalibration of the meaning of opportunity depended, in part, on arguments that highlighted competition for workers inside corporate entities and between corporations themselves.19 This shift corresponded to the desire of trade unionists for higher wages and shorter hours as they grounded opportunity in consumption and leisure.

While many argued that the vastness of economic production limited opportunities for those without sufficient capital, Paul Morton, vice president of the Atchison, Topeka & Sante Fe Railroad, claimed that reorienting opportunity toward mobility within the corporation meant that the larger the combination “the more requirement there is for brains and the higher the compensation that is offered for it.”20 Ohio senator Marcus Hanna also extolled the capacity for organized capital to increase opportunities by rewarding effort and skill, illustrated in his eyes by the number of industry leaders who “came from the loom and forge and furnace.” Consolidated industry offered workers “better opportunities” that depended on recognizing merit within the corporation. “Among the number—a large number—of boys in my office, every one of them is the son of a poor man that has earned his place,” Hanna declared to an enthusiastic audience.21

Standard Oil lawyer S. C. T. Dodd, who is often credited with inventing the trust as a means to circumvent laws designed to limit cartels, a development that he characterized as the inevitable march of civilization and progress, assured an anxious public that “the man who still fears the combination will destroy competition … would have feared a conflagration during Noah’s flood.” Defenders of trusts claimed that opportunities continued to abound in the United States and that this, in fact, distinguished the nation from Europe, where antagonistic class conflict dominated. An editorial in a 1903 issue of the NCF journal declared that “there is no other country where there are opportunities for the laboring man, where he is industrious, as much as here in America.”22 The persistent appeal of the idea of opportunity for those who endorsed trusts lay in its capacity to harmoniously resolve the tensions between labor and capital that so defined the Gilded Age. Further, so long as opportunity continued to thrive one’s status remained an individual responsibility.

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