Plutocracy The First Time Around Revisiting the Great Upheaval and the First Gilded Age

Plutocracy The First Time Around
Revisiting the Great Upheaval and the First Gilded Age
By Steve Fraser
[The following passages are excerpted and slightly adapted from The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (Little, Brown and Company).]
Part 1: The Great Upheaval
What came to be known as the Great Upheaval, the movement for the eight-hour day, elicited what one historian has called “a strange enthusiasm.” The normal trade union strike is a finite event joining two parties contesting over limited, if sometimes intractable, issues. The mass strike in 1886 or before that in 1877 -- all the many localized mass strikes that erupted in towns and small industrial cities after the Civil War and into the new century -- was open-ended and ecumenical in reach.
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