The Yellow Dog Unleashed

Abstract

Pittsburgh, Saturday, July 21, 1877, the night that the American Dream lay shattered among the broken glass and rubble of the city’s burning goods yards, the night that the spirit of entrepreneurialism and unrestrained capitalism clashed headlong with the demands of railroad workers for a fair day’s pay. People were dying, caught up in the ugliest labor disturbances that America had experienced. The disturbances were put down by federal troops ordered to turn on their countrymen for the first time, just twelve years after the country had emerged from civil war. From the start of the dispute five days earlier to its end nine days later, more than a hundred people, some of them bystanders, would be killed in street fighting centered on Baltimore, Cumberland, Pittsburgh, and Reading.

The worker who strikes for higher wages does not do so simply because he is greedy and wants all the material comforts he can get; instead he seeks economic justice in which his labor is compensated fairly in relation to others — in other words that it be recognized for its true worth.

(Francis Fukuyama, b. 1952)