Unemployment as a recurring feature of the social landscape only caught American attention with the rise of capitalism in the pre-Civil War era. Before that, even if the rhythms of agricultural and village life included seasonal oscillations between periods of intense labor and downtime, farmers and handicraftsmen generally retained the ability to sustain their families.
Hard times were common enough, but except in extremis most people retained land and tools, not to speak of common rights to woodlands, grazing areas, and the ability to hunt and fish. They were -- we would say today -- "self-employed." Only when such means of subsistence and production became concentrated in the hands of merchant-capitalists, manufacturers, and large landowners did the situation change fundamentally. A proletariat -- those without property of any kind except their own labor power -- made its appearance, dependent on the propertied to employ them. If, for whatever reason, the market for their labor power dried up, they were set adrift.
This process of dispossession lasted more than a century. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, its impact remained limited. The farmers, handicraftsmen, fishermen, and various tradespeople swept into the new textile or shoe factories, or the farm women set to work out in the countryside spinning and weaving for merchant capitalists still held onto some semblance of their old ways of life. They maintained vegetable gardens, continued to hunt and fish, and perhaps kept a few domestic animals.
When the first commercial panics erupted in the 1830s and 1850s and business came to a standstill, many could fall back on pre-capitalist ways of making a living, even if a bare one. Still, the first regiments of the reserve army of the unemployed had made their appearance. Jobless men were already roaming the roads, an alarming new sight for townspeople not used to such things.
Demobilizing the Workforce Becomes the New Norm
When industrial capitalism exploded after the Civil War, unemployment suddenly became a chronic and frightening aspect of modern life affecting millions. Panics and depressions now occurred with distressing frequency. Their randomness, severity, and duration (some lasted half a decade or more) only swelled the ranks of the reserve army. Crushing helplessness in the face of unemployment would be a devastating new experience for the great waves of immigrants just landing on American shores, many of them peasants from southern and eastern Europe accustomed to falling back on their own meager resources in fields and forests when times were bad.
The very presence of this "army" of able-bodied but destitute workers seemed to catch the essential savagery of the new economy and it stunned onlookers. The "tramp" became a ubiquitous figure, travelling the roads and rails, sometimes carrying his tools with him, desperate for work. He proved a threatening specter for villagers and city people alike.
Just as shocking was a growing realization -- made undeniable by each dismal repetition of the business cycle -- that the new industrial economy wasn't just producing that reserve army, but depended on its regular mobilization and demobilization to carry on the process of capital accumulation. It was no passing phenomenon, no natural disaster that would run its course. It was the new normal.
Initial reactions were varied and dramatic. Local governments rushed to pass punitive laws against tramping and vagrancy, mandating terms of six months to two years of hard labor in workhouses. Meanwhile, the orthodox thinking of that moment raised steep barriers to government aid for those in need. During the devastating depression of the 1870s, for instance, President Ulysses Grant's Secretary of the Treasury put things succinctly: "It is not part of the business of government to find employment for people."
Punishment and studied indifference were, however, by no means the only responses as emergency relief efforts -- some private, some public -- became common. The ravaging effects of unemployment, the way it spread like a plague, and its chronic reappearance also put more radical measures on the agenda, proposals that questioned the viability and morality of what was then termed the "wages system."
Calls went out to colonize vacant land and establish state-run factories and farms to productively re-employ the idled. Infuriated throngs occupied state houses demanding public works. Elements of the labor and populist movements advocated manufacturing and agricultural cooperatives as a way around the ruthlessness of the Darwinian free market. Business "trusts" or monopolies were often decried for driving other businesses under and so exacerbating the unemployment dilemma. In some cases, their nationalization was called for. Militants of the moment began to demand work not as a sop to the indigent, but as a right of citizenship, as precious and inviolable as anything in the Bill of Rights.
The greatest and most prolonged mass mobilization of the mid-1880s was the national movement for the eight-hour work day. It was animated partly by a desire for more leisure time, but also by a vain hope that its passage by Congress might effectively raise wages. (Industrialists, however, had no intention of paying the same amount for eight hours of work as they had for 12.) Its main impetus, though, was a belief that mandating a national reduction in the hours of work would spread jobs around and so diminish the ranks of the reserve army.
Some were convinced that capitalism's appetite for human labor was too voracious for business ever to agree to such limits. So long as the business cycle was on its upward arc, the compulsion to exploit labor power was insatiable. When the market went south, all that surplus humanity could be left to fend for itself. Its partisans nonetheless believed that the movement for an eight-hour day would expose the barbarism of the economic system for all to see, opening the door to something more humane.
In other words, a wide spectrum of responses to unemployment was enfolded within a broad and growing anti-capitalist culture. Within the organized labor movement, that proto-union, the Knights of Labor, was immersed in the idea of an anti-capitalist insurgency. Most trade unions of the time, however, accepted that the "wages system" was here to stay and focused instead on the issues of job security, fighting for unemployment benefit funds for members, seniority, prohibitions against overtime, and the shortening of working hours.
Even agitation to ban child labor and limit female employment was motivated in part by a desire to temper the pervasiveness of unemployment by curtailing the pool of available labor. Other trade union procedures and proposals were more mean-spirited, including attempts to ban immigration or exclude African-American and other minorities or the unskilled from membership in the movement. That insularity bedevils trade unionism to this day.
As part of this tumultuous season of upheaval, which lasted from the 1870s through the Great Depression, the unemployed themselves organized demonstrations. A gathering in Tomkins Square Park of thousands of New Yorkers left destitute by the panic and depression of 1873 was dispersed with infamous brutality by the police. Local newspapers labeled the protestors "communards." (The recently defeated Paris Commune had ignited a hysterical fear of "un-American" radicalism, a toxin that has never since left the American bloodstream.)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).