PRESENT DAY

"The enforcing legislation, known as Jim Crow laws, soon applied to every type of public facility--restaurants, hotels, streetcars, even cemeteries. In the 1890s, the South became a region fully segregated by law for the first time" (America, pg. 586).

The "Jim Crow Laws" were a series of legislation, mostly passed in the south, at the local and state level. These laws made segregation of blacks and whites not only legal, but in certain instances--such as public schools and transportation--required. They began in the late nineteenth-century and continued all the way through until the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s. The laws mandated that blacks and whites have "separate but equal" facilities. However, the reality was that the black facilities were almost never "equal" to the white facilities and Jim Crow laws were simply a legal way to promote the perceived "inferiority" of blacks.

The term "Jim Crow" is derived from a popular minstrel show in the early-mid nineteenth-century, which featured a white performer with charcoal or burnt cork applied to his face, singing and dancing to the song "Jump Jim Crow," and in essence, portraying a ridiculous caricature of a black person. The character became a staple of minstrel theater and was a derogatory stereotype of blacks, which was beginning to become common in the period.

The famous Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 validated the South's Jim Crow laws, ruling that segregation was not discriminatory, and therefore did not violate any civil rights in the fourteenth amendment, as long as the segregation provided equal treatment to blacks--hence the term "separate but equal." Racism and discrimination was becoming more prevalent and more intense during the late nineteenth-century, and thus the Jim Crow Laws reflected the zeitgeist.



The History of Jim Crow: Creating Jim Crow
What was Jim Crow?
PBS: The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

The Pullman Strike of 1894
In May 11, 1894, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company, which manufactured the famous Pullman sleeping railroad cars, staged a walkout. The basis of this walkout was the fact that George Pullman was cutting wages but not the rent on the company-owned housing. The workers were members of the American Railway Union (ARU), headed by Eugene V. Debs (see post on Debs). Debs directed all ARU members not to handle any of the Pullman cars, an action that not only hurt the Pullman company, but had a secondary and even bigger effect of crippling the railroad industry. The strike continued until mid-July when both the boycott and the union were broken, but not without violence and vandalism. Government soldiers were brought in to get the trains running again. Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to prison for his part in the strike. Although the new ARU had strength and a lot of members, they were not successful in their strike due to the government's intervention on the side of the railroad companies.

"No one could doubt why the great Pullman boycott had failed: it had been crushed by the naked use of government power on behalf of the railroad companies." (America, p. 531)

Henry George saw first-hand the plight of the American worker at the end of the ninetieth-century. He grew up in Philadelphia in 1839, in a poor family, and like many working-class Americans at the time, he was forced to end his formal education early in order to survive--he was just fourteen years old. When George when out into the world of work, he began to see the ever-growing gap between the wealthy and the working class poor. He wondered why there was such a discrepancy in a society that was supposed to democratic and humanitarian.

In 1857, George moved west to California, and after having difficulty holding down work, he eventually became a newspaper reporter in San Francisco. He decided he would educate himself in economics, in an attempt to understand the situation he saw in America. George came up with the "single tax" concept, which would be published in his 1879 book, Progress and Poverty. The book sought to explain why poverty rates were growing as progress was being made in leaps and bounds.

George theorized that much of the disparity between the wealthy and the poor had to do with land speculation, which made the already wealthy land owners even more rich, while the poor working-class worker received the same meager wages and had to pay more and more in rent. George's "single tax" idea proposed that the unearned appreciation of land value be taxed and taken from the owner, and given back to the community, for the greater good of the people.

The book was a big success, with over one hundred editions and an estimated six million Americans having read it by1906. Progress and Poverty also spawned "single tax clubs" and movements all over the country. One important aspect of the book was that it broke down the economics very simply, so that the average American could understand. While George and his book never directly caused any change in the legislation, it served to help make Americans aware of the increasing problems that the growing Industrialism in the country was causing. Average citizens could see, simply, how the country's economy was working and why they were having such a hard time earning a wage that could support a family.

"The Song of the Shirt" is a poem written by British poet Thomas Hood, Esq. It was published anonymously in a London publication in 1843 as a means of informing the public of the exploitation of workers in Britain. It was quickly taken and printed on sheets and handkerchiefs and was even hailed by Charles Dickens, among other writers of the era. In 1908, famed director D. W. Griffith made it into a movie by the same name.
Although this poem was written to describe working conditions in Britain, it could easily have been a description of the exploitation of garment factory workers in the United States as well. Most of these workers were women and it is from this point of view that Hood wrote the poem. In it, we can get a sense of the tedium and long hours that these workers were forced to endure: "Work, work, work, while the cock is crowing aloof, and work, work, work, till the stars shine through the roof".
We can also see clearly what reward they received for these long, hard hours of work: "Work work, work, my labor never flags, and what are its wages? A bed of straw, a crust of bread - and rags."
Lastly, we can hear the questioning of this woman as she sits and sews all day and into the night, asking why things are the reverse of how they should be: "Oh, God - that bread should be so dear and flesh and blood so cheap!"
Most of us think of worker exploitation, poor working conditions and little pay as problems of a by-gone era, but unfortunately, these conditions still exist today for many workers in various countries around the world, the United States included.

"In most fields no single innovation was as decisive as Swift's refrigerator car. But other entrepreneurs did share Swift's insight that the essential step was to identify a mass market and then develop a national enterprise capable of serving it. In the petroleum industry John D. Rockefeller built the Standard Oil Company partly by taking over rival firms, but he also built a distribution system to reach the enormous market for kerosene for light and heating homes" (America, p.512).

After the civil war, with the United States' population spread across the whole of what is now the lower continental 48 states, large-scale enterprise began to form in order to reach a wider market. With the mass-immigration and rise in birth rates, the population of the U.S. shot up from approximately 40 million in 1870 to over 60 million in 1890. John D. Rockefeller was one of the pioneers of large-scale enterprise, and is a legendary figure in the history of U.S. business. He created an oil empire that was rivaled only by the largest monopolies in the country. Rockefeller used both Vertical Integration (owning companies that can create a product from start to finish -- i.e. refineries, storage, transport, etc.) and Horizontal Integration (buying out competing businesses in order to reduce competition) in order to create one huge monopoly.

By creating an oil company that was efficient, as well as getting into the industry at the right time--kerosene was in high demand for heating and lamps, and gasoline & diesel fuels were becoming more and more demanded--he was able to grow his business tremendously. Rockefeller's company, the Standard Oil Company, negotiated with the Railroad industry to get rebates, not only for his use of the rail, but also his competitors'. To get around laws of the time which made it hard to operate your company outside of it's home state, Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company created the "Standard Oil Trust" in 1882. This allowed Rockefeller and his partners to merge all of their businesses from around the country under one "trust," which was essentially a large corporation. In 1911, the Supreme Court found The Standard Oil Company to be a monopoly and the company was divided up into over thirty smaller companies. By this time, Rockefeller had become the richest man in the U.S., and the first Billionaire, and he retired from the Oil Industry. Rockefeller then used his enormous wealth to help others. He is one of the great Philanthropists of our time and gave most of his fortune back through Philanthropy, donating large sums of money into education, health care and various other public domains.

The Rockefeller Archive Center
PBS: The Rockefellers
The Rockefeller Foundation