Robber Barons and Wretched Refuse: Ethnic and Class Dynamics during the Era of American Industrialization

This book's catchy title expresses the ruthlessness and extremes of the economic divide established during the Gilded Age. “Wretched refuse” suggests the way capitalists sought to deploy the world's poor as exploitable labor for profit, with an ironic nod to Emma Lazarus's poem. Zeidel chronicles capitalists’ constant search for workers who would take the lowest-paid and most dangerous work in the age of industrialization. They both needed and often reviled the immigrants they hired. When these recruits participated in strikes or were rebellious, the elite labeled them tools of foreign ideas and un-American radicals. Capitalists’ overt efforts to undermine labor campaigns and deny labor rights through a divide-and-conquer strategy in key industries contributed to a dynamic that led to political repression and immigration restriction, Zeidel argues. The media and influential commentators of the era might criticize the rich, but they strategically targeted the labor radicals and immigrants in ways that distracted from the reality of class power.Zeidel brings together the study of immigration restriction with the study of labor repression from 1865 to 1925. These are usually disconnected fields of study. Historians have long debated whether antiradicalism was a grassroots irrational hysteria, an elite-driven phenomenon, or a product of episodic wartime hysteria. Most treatments center on World War I as the pivot. Michael Rogin gave a theoretical interpretive lift by suggesting that political demonology had a psychological basis traceable to settler colonialism. Rogin examined the intersection of public and private forces in the enterprise, and connected it to the liberal impulse to create order. Zeidel's book seems to join that interpretation, implicating Progressives who yearned to restore class harmony. Others have contributed specific books about episodes from the Molly Maguires onward where employers and Pinkertons have been strategic, but they usually then leave out the way these affected immigration debates. Michael Kazin, on the other hand, has dismissed the role of repression in the fortunes of the US labor radicalism. While Zeidel is obviously arguing against Kazin's conclusion, he misses an opportunity to position the book in this dialogue. But the narrative he offers is full of insights regarding the connections between anti-radicalism and the immigration debate.Zeidel is more direct about placing this study in the historiography of immigration restriction, clearly stating that he is arguing against a genre of literature that reaches back to John Higham's Strangers in the Land, an approach that stressed nativism as a cultural construct and agent, and nationalism and nation-building around exclusion. This scholarship has often been untethered from employers and labor market conflicts even when there are mentions, for example, of incidents like Haymarket, and usually is centered on discourse, whiteness, social psychology, panics, and workers’ role in the exclusion efforts. Zeidel does not ignore labor's responsibility, but he brings capitalists in as key agents who shaped the dynamic. The parade of labor conflicts that fit into this tight survey will be familiar to labor historians, from Molly Maguires to Haymarket to Ludlow and Bisbee, but Zeidel reaches for lesser-known episodes as well. As far as I know, this is the only book that connects these many labor conflicts with campaigns for restriction across this long temporal arc. Zeidel also includes some interesting and understudied elements of the zero-sum game, such as African Americans’ perception that they were shut out of jobs due to competition from immigrants who were preferred by managers. They then came out solidly for restriction.The capitalists who recruited immigrants justified their efforts with lofty appeals to the concept of free labor markets and the belief that they could not prosper without this fresh labor supply. Zeidel shows their private and public views also encompassed harsher perspectives. In Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, coal mine operators deployed immigrants to counter what they considered radical agitators. In California, railroad magnate Charles Crocker ordered men from China as if he were ordering sacks of flour, expressing the view that Chinese workers were pliable and docile. Employers and especially managers used racial typing viciously and consistently in the workplace as a device to gain advantage. If that increased workers’ propensity to see immigrants as nothing more than tools of employers, managers could sit back and let the sentiment fester in order to make it more difficult for workers to unify. Employers knew they benefited from this perception, and Zeidel documents the obvious: their construction of the market contributed to a dehumanization of immigrants that redounded to their benefit in a perfect circle. Zeidel has collected reams of the poisonous commentaries from newspapers that emanated in the aftermath of labor conflicts. The author does not exactly reconcile this with a recitation of Isaac Hourwich's claim that immigrants did not reduce workers’ wages; in fact, the book's parade of examples contradicts it. But he suggests that anti-radicalism affected the labor movement's capacity to fight back effectively against capital's formula.Zeidel also shows how middle-class labor allies contributed to this dynamic by feeding the storm that paired radicals and immigrants as unsuitable for citizenship, as the ones who were creating disharmony under capitalism. Zeidel reminds us that academic labor economists Edward Bemis and John Commons drove some of this xenophobic rhetoric in an example of this professional middle-class role. Zeidel, whose first book was on the Dillingham Commission's role in immigration restriction, positions these figures in the middle of a power struggle that drove the 1924 Johnson-Reed legislation. These founders of the labor economics profession used their status and knowledge toward the restriction resolution even when, like Commons, they sat on the much-vaunted Progressive Era Commission on Industrial Relations. The chapter on Johnson-Reed inexplicably misses the strategic role of anti-labor and anti-radical activists John Bond Trevor, highlighted by Nick Fisher in Spider Web (2016), but nevertheless contributes in ways that challenges the notion that employers were blindsided and simply opposed to restrictions.