What history teaches us about the welfare state

The continued economic misery for the many, juxtaposed against fabulous wealth for the few, generated intense hostility to great fortunes. Workers, suffering the most without a welfare state, responded with ever-greater militancy.

The labor struggles of the age were as epic as the fortunes of the tycoons: the Molly Maguires of the Pennsylvania coal fields; the great railroad strike of 1877 that nearly paralyzed the nation; the Haymarket affair of 1886, in which a bomb killed eight people in a Chicago demonstration; the Homestead strike of 1892, probably the most violent labor conflict in American history.

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But these were just the most famous episodes of labor unrest: Between 1881 and 1890, there were 9,668 strikes and lockouts, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1886, more than 600,000 workers engaged in 143 strikes and 140 lockouts. State and federal militias were repeatedly called out to quash labor unrest. In the Pittsburgh rail yards in 1877, Pennsylvania militia members fired into the crowds and violence broke loose. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent federal troops to restore order.

The vast disparities between rich and poor, the spectacular concentration of wealth amassed by the richest Americans in the previous two generations, and the inability of government policies to mitigate the crisis brought the nation to the edge of class warfare and social disintegration.

The specter of a European social order, with societies irredeemably divided between aristocrats and a permanent underclass, seemed to have arrived on U.S. shores. Wealthy Americans began to fear for the stability of the social order.

What force, the wealthy asked in desperation, might mitigate the social chaos and misery, and mute what one public official called “the antagonism between rich and poor”?

Today, new fortunes have been accumulated that rival those of the Gilded Age. Some of that wealth, possessed by people like Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch or Peter G. Peterson, has been used to promote cuts to social spending. Before these opponents and their allies in Congress move forward with the dismantling of the welfare state, however, they might think harder about the reasons such policies were put in place.

The Gilded Age plutocrats who first acceded to a social welfare system and state regulations did not do so from the goodness of their hearts. They did so because the alternatives seemed so much more terrifying.

François Furstenberg is the author of “In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation” and is an associate professor of history at the Universite de Montreal.