It too saw vast fortunes created by exploiting the applications of new technologies, and those fortunes wound up in the hands of very few, who came to be known as the Robber Barons. The gap between the very wealthy few and most Americans was huge, particularly the new industrial workers at the bottom. They were often immigrants.
But it was also in this time of virtually unchecked economic and political power for these robber barons, and desperate poverty for exploited workers, that the labor union movement in America took hold.
The first union members were beaten and killed by company thugs and the official police, both being paid by the same barons. They were thrown out of their homes and starved. They lost strikes more often than they won them for decades. But they persisted.
It was at the tail end of the Gilded Age that the federal holiday of Labor Day was first declared. By then (in 1894) 30 states had already designated their labor days. At first, the federal holiday only mandated that federal employees get the day off. It became a real holiday for actual workers deep into the 20th century (though probably a smaller proportion gets the day off now.)
Labor Day was in specific recognition of labor unions and the labor movement. For awhile, even in my lifetime, labor unions were a major political force, a power base somewhat balancing the power of corporate wealth. They helped bring about an era of a new middle class, and less of a wealth gap between the few at the top and everyone else. All that right wing nostalgia about life for ordinary people in the 1950s, when America was great--all that happened to a large degree because of what unions accomplished.
Though the membership is different now as well as much smaller, unions still have political force, though much diminished. In that regard it is interesting that a very recent Gallup poll showed that 47% of Americans surveyed said they want unions to have more influence than they do, a record high in this century.
Recently I've taken note of the number of mainstream politicians (Senator Jon Ossoff, Senate candidate James Talarico, for example), economist Paul Krugman and other public figures (actor Richard Gere, etc.) who have spoken plainly about the near total dominance of our political and economic systems by a very small number of billionaires, perhaps a half dozen. They face no organized countervailing force.
The long painful struggle for the power of labor unions to represent the interests of otherwise powerless workers involved members of my family and almost everyone I knew in western Pennsylvania. It is possible that the encampment of strike families thrown out of their company homes as shown in the photo above happened on the hill where I later grew up.
Many people back there are among those who seem to have forgotten this era and what it meant. Absent the big union picnics at Mount Odin and Idlewild and elsewhere (though they still happen in some places), this holiday has become like so many others--mostly about the purported bargains for products by companies without unions, some (especially but not exclusively abroad) using near-slave labor including children. While the companies that sell these products also use new technologies as well as old oppressions to exploit their workers as well as their customers. While the wealth divide grows deeper and deeper.
