Class Wars: Race, Class, and Violence in the Long Gilded Age

968258 CRS0010.1177/0896920520968258Critical SociologyRogers-Cooper review-article2020 Review Essay Class Wars: Race, Class, and Violence in the Long Gilded Age Critical Sociology 1–11 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920520968258 DOI: 10.1177/0896920520968258 journals.sagepub.com/home/crs Justin Rogers-Cooper LaGuardia Community College, CUNY Graduate Center, USA Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and The Rise of Jim Crow, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Penguin Press, 2019. 320pp. $30.00 (Hardcover). ISBN: 9780525559535. The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, & Class Conflicts in the American West, by Mark A. Lause. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2017. 304pp. $29.95 (Hardback). ISBN: 9781786631961. Tramps & Trade Union Travelers: Internal Migration and Organized Labor in Gilded Age America, 1870–1900, by Kim Moody. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2019. 330pp. $22.00 (paperback). ISBN: 9781608467556. When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict From 1877 to 1921, by Robert Ovetz. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2019. 606pp. $36.00 (paperback). ISBN: 9781642590593. The texts under review here each innovate on existing scholarship in the field of 19th century and early 20th American studies, labor history, and the history of social and class violence in the United States. Three of the texts in question—authored by Kim Moody, Mark A. Lause, and Robert Ovetz—make impressive contributions to our understanding of an often overlooked and frequently oversimplified period in American labor history. Placing them in conversation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s account of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow is intentional and meant to desegregate the story of industrialized labor conflict from Jim Crow racial capitalism. This common division is due in part to traditional definitions of capitalism and the assumptions of academic disciplines: Reconstruction belongs to historians, and “class conflict” to labor history and leftist scholars who work with more European and masculinized assumptions about the nature of working class history, with feminist and racialized labor studies often relegated to other fields (Davis, 1983; Federici, 2004; Kessler-Harris, 2007; Weeks, 2011; Williams, 2018). Wherever one lands on such questions, it’s important to contextualize the texts under review within a framework that accounts for such complexities. Gates’ Stony the Road (2019) was originally intended as a companion text to the PBS documentary Reconstruction: After the Civil War that he produced the same year. He consigns the rise of the Redemption period beginning 1877, “when the gains of Reconstruction were systematically Corresponding author: Justin Rogers-Cooper, LaGuardia Community College, 594 Sterling Place #3, Brooklyn, New York 11238, USA. Email: [email protected] 2 Critical Sociology 00(0) erased” (2019: xv), a practical if somewhat arbitrary division given that violent white supremacist movements achieved significant political and military victories prior to that year (Egerton, 2014: 316). Given Gates’ desire to write for a general audience, however, the text actually advances a number of claims that will interest specialists. He makes a compelling case for how the imagery of Jim Crow was used to “kill Reconstruction” and the Fourteenth Amendment (Gates, 2019: xviii). Not surprisingly, Gates heralds the power of suffrage as one of the important victories of Reconstruction. Yet his incorporation of Allen Guezlo’s emphasis on the legal innovation of birthright citizenship, which proved vital to continuing claims by black Americans that they had rights, proves more provocative. Similarly, Gates relates that Guezlo finds success in the fact Reconstruction didn’t trigger a “genocidal race war” (cited in Gates, 2019: 36). Gates usefully addresses the problem of Jim Crow’s emergence as a national project, too, capturing the important idea that many abolitionists could “detest slavery” and yet also “detest the enslaved and the formerly enslaved” (Gates, 2019: 11). His emphasis on how Southern ideologies of white supremacy fed Northern racism after the Civil War helps explain not only the abandonment of civil rights but also the tolerance of lynchings and other forms of racial violence. The first two-thirds of the text catalogue a range of cultural products and texts that articulate the culture of Jim Crow. Gates is rightfully insistent that the cultural factory of racist images and texts about blacks helped impose “neo-enslavement” (2019: 4) on recently emancipated African Americans. Through attention to figures like Lewis Henry Morgan and cases like Buck v Bell, he treats antebellum and postwar scientific racism as well as eugenics with excellent detail, including through the World War I period into institutions like the American Museum of Natural History. He weaves the production of scientific stereotypes to cultural production in periodicals like the Atlantic Monthly and North American Review, noting how the convergence of racist thinking with plantation literature about the “Old Negro” (Gates, 2019: 91) deepened by the 1890s. Even readers familiar with white power novelists such as Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, or with films like The Birth of a Nation, will appreciate how Gates can situate their efforts alongside the mass production of chromolithographic advertisements depicting subhuman images of African Americans, or with the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Gates’ arguments about how “useful” (2019: 95) such fictions could be to abolishing black civil rights is paramount to his conviction that “Sambo art” culture matters greatly to the success of the Jim Crow political economy (2019: 126). Further, it supports his insistence on preserving and studying the archive of racist iconography and blackface. The book provides dozens of ample and devastating color images that illustrate his claims throughout. The large consumer market full of lynching postcards and household products featuring ghoulish black faces remains astonishing to contemplate, and Gates captures its epic scale: “consumption was inextricably intertwined with the legalization of racial segregation” (2019: 135). Furthermore, during his discussion of the racial and gender politics of miscegenation panics, Gates rather effortlessly explains how fears of the black rapist were projected fantasies, and uses Y-DNA data to relay the “frequency of the rape of black women by white men during slavery” (2019: 146). The text’s emphasis on Jim Crow visual culture distinguishes it from other accounts, and Gates’ analyses undergirding the text’s broad coverage of the period are largely inventive. The last third of the text turns to the subject of the New Negro, which was conceived to retaliate against the “New South,” a neologism coined in 1874 and popularized in 1886. Gates dates the black cultural innovation of the New Negro earlier than most studies, to the period between 1894 and 1925, and persuasively suggests that the black intellectual labor invested in the New Negro idea intended to rebut the white supremacist cultural project of Jim Crow. The New Negro, he argues, was a “metaphorical form of ‘reconstruction’” (Gates, 2019: 186). Fruitfully tracing the idea to W. E. C. Wright, Gates pivots from Booker T. Washington’s speech at the 1895 Atlanta Rogers-Cooper 3 exposition to the politics of respectability and the Talented Tenth. He presents compelling examples that deserve further study in the process, as exemplified by Du Bois’s Exhibit of American Negroes at the Paris Exposition in France in 1900, when Du Bois selected 363 photographs of diverse black Americans to refute Jim Crow stereotypes and celebrate black achievement. Gates follows the class politics of the New Negro into Harlem, and the most interesting aspect of his summary of the Harlem Renaissance, and his introduction to figures like Alain Locke or subjects like jazz, is how he positions the vernacular, musical, and literary innovations of the period as the “tail end of ‘the long Reconstruction’” (Gates, 2019: 231). Such claims are novel because treatments of the Harlem Renaissance are usually separate from histories of Reconstruction. Widening the historical and conceptual idea of Reconstruction generously opens the fields of 19th and 20th century studies to each other. Gates’ attention to economic matters isn’t insignificant, but his hesitancy to theorize capitalism indicates why segregating Reconstruction studies from labor studies benefits neither. He attends to the revolutionary potential of redistributing Confederate lands to the formerly enslaved but leaves implicit whether capitalist logic, not racial injustice, overdetermined the denial of land to the formerly enslaved. The same could be said for the Supreme Court’s dismantling of black civil rights in years between 1876 and 1883: was the rise of white supremacy solely responsible for antiblack racism, or did the laws need to change to reboot primitive accumulation? Granted, Gates alludes to the idea that Reconstruction ended as a result of the Panic of 1873, and he posits antiblack racism as an effect of the South’s “political economy” and the “signal role of cheap black labor in the economy” (Gates, 2019: 16). Yet while Gates soundly argues that white supremacist discourse “justified” neo-slavery in the cotton industry of the New South, he does not use the phrase racial capitalism, nor even capitalism; at one point, he turns to the idea of “economic suppression” (Gates, 2019: 187). He relates that the “Negro’s labor had to be exploited as ruthlessly and as effectively as possible” as a motive for obliterating civil rights (Gates, 2019: 66), but doesn’t extend that imperative to the present nor does he connect it to concurrent class warfare occurring in the mines, on the railroads, and in the factories of the north and west. Stony the Road thus privileges the “war of representation” (Gates, 2019: 19) in the field of culture over a different analysis about why and how white supremacist discourse served the needs of accumulation. The significance of separating Reconstruction from the study of other class movements in the long Gilded Age points to another problem in Gates’ account: there is almost no sense that anyone other than African Americans were contesting Jim Crow racial capitalism. By contrast, Mark A. Lause’s The Great Cowboy Strike offers a sweeping new history of strike waves in western locations, particularly ranches and range wars, and does so through novel attention to the least suspecting of strikers: the cowboy. In the process, Lause reconfigures what we know about the Knights of Labor, the Great Upheaval of the 1880s, and relations between western labor conflicts, the Greenback movement, and the Farmers’ Alliance. He stages his story by beginning with the racial and ethnic cleansing projects of western migrants, complicating the picture by showing how white settlers animated by Manifest Destiny soon found themselves at the mercy of powerful and violent corporate actors. While settlers waged their wars of extermination against indigenous people, plants, and animals, the booming demand for beef after the Civil War created new markets and seeded new conflicts. New railroad extensions in towns like Dodge City, Kansas coincided with renewed military attacks on populations of Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas during the Red River War of 1874, shifting cattle drives west and drawing scores of workers to the settlements processing cow herds. In this example and others throughout the book, Lause expertly reframes the stereotypes of the violence associated with the west, from family feuds to gunplay, as class conflicts. His account of how small ranchers rustled cows on the open range and took them to market, and subsequently how this practice was violently disciplined by large ranchers using hired thugs, 4 Critical Sociology 00(0) typifies the strengths of the text. The arrival of the Farmers’ Alliance in Texas, for example, helps us understand the nature of the Higgins–Horrell feud or “Hood-doo War.” Lause narrates the secrecy of the suballiances, the “need for armed struggle” (Lause, 2018: 39), and the clash of “little armies” (Lause, 2018: 39) competing for access to land, farming, ranching. The Farmers’ Alliance became the base of the Populist or People’s Party that emerged in the 1890s. One of the unexpected discoveries in Lause’s book concerns how he connected western class organization in Kansas and elsewhere to farming collectives like the Patrons of Husbandry (the Grange), a movement that originated in Minnesota. There were 2,000 clubs in Missouri by 1874, for example, with 80,000 members. Leaders there sought to organize African American lodges. One such leader, Andrew Warner St. John, launched the Industrial Brotherhood (IB) that same year in St. Louis. Notably, they admitted women and addressed their purpose to “the working classes” (cited in Lause, 2018: 27). Even more importantly, Lause reveals that the IB was the direct descendent of the National Labor Union (NLU), and key leaders of the IB soon overlapped with the foundations of the National or Independence Party—soon called the Greenback Party. Further, in 1878 the Knights of Labor adopted language from the IB in its platform and strategy, including “support for the equality of all workers regardless of craft, race, or gender” (Lause, 2018: 31). Significantly, despite the IB’s interracial membership, this brotherhood organization and later the Knights gained support in states like Tennessee, Alabama, and Virginia during the 1870s; African Americans joined in large numbers in Arkansas and Texas. Lause sets his discussion within the national rise of Greenbackers and other independent parties in the late 1870s, threading their growth into a story of the Knights and Farmers’ Alliance. He follows these developments into the 1880s, into Antimonopolism and Democratic politics, and later into the formation of the Union Labor Party in 1887 (which became the Populists). In his analysis of the 1888 elections in Oldham County, Texas, Lause reveals that “something like half of the Southern white cowboy strikers voted for a party that explicitly practiced interracial cooperation” (2018: 187). Many readers will be curious about Lause’s redefinition of cowboys, who were a small but significant part of the agricultural workforce. Their intense, seasonal, and dangerous work lent itself to a unique culture, which Lause renders in rich detail. Contrary to most popular representations, low wages brought cowboys together to work collectively. The consolidation of the land by rapid enclosures enforced by fences and bullets made class mobility moot, and as a result cowboys often went on strike. The Panhandle Strike of 1883 proves to be an exceptional example because it succeeded in raising wages. A strike wave continued over the next three years, and “regulators” like Pat Garrett, who killed Billy the Kid, were paid to hunt striking cowboys (Lause, 2018: 111). His account of how the strike wave intersected with the southwest strikes of 1886 will interest scholars familiar with the period. Lause advances his history with analysis that routinely punctuates traditional interpretations. In his fascinating retelling of political violence and conspiracy in Coffeyville, Kansas in 1888, his attention to the subterfuge of the town’s political machinery becomes an analogy about the class corruption and violence of the entire long Gilded Age: “The dominant, most well-armed and ruthless powers in Kansas engaged in remarkably reckless and potentially lethal activities to validate libel against political opponents. . . [and] those who killed for the power structure never needed to lose sleep over whether they would be called to account” (Lause, 2018: 214). In a related chapter, he describes how political violence across the South was not just a tactic of social control over African Americans, but also over the Knights, strikers, the Farmers’ Alliance, and others. In places like Wyoming, Lause shows the connections between “cowboy discontent, range wars, and political insurgency” (2018: 232) in the Johnston County War. In his conclusion, Lause artfully connects his new history of the west with mythologies that came after, with superb readings of popular culture into the present. Rogers-Cooper 5 Kim Moody’s Tramps and Trade Union Travelers opens a wider lens on late 19th century labor. The text is built around an original and transformative insight about the role of internal migration to the relative “success” of the labor movement after the Civil War: “The working class of the late nineteenth-century was, so to speak, formed on the run” (Moody, 2019: 1). The import of the claim, which Moody proves throughout the text, helps him rebut longtime assumptions about the power, or lack thereof, of the US working-class during the era. His introduction is an excellent summary of traditional arguments about the differences between the US and European working classes, touching on questions of socialism, land and homesteading, class and job consciousness, social mobility, and repressive violence. He carefully attends to race, ethnicity, and gender, admitting “the racial and ethnic composition of the emerging Gilded-Age working class” was “unique” (Moody, 2019: 15). He accepts these factors as significant. At the same time, his account that the postReconstruction South was partly “pre-capitalist” signals one of the only limitations of the text: it allows Moody to focus only on the regions where migration did occur (the North and West) and thus generalize about the working class as a whole, as if black sharecroppers (who “did not receive a wage”) were partly outside capitalism (2019: 18). Incorporating Southern black workers as part of capitalism, however ensconced in neo-slavery they were, might have led to different conclusions—or at least other directions. Nevertheless, Moody’s essential contention about industrialized and urban labor will anchor all future analyses of the period: “internal migration is not only the missing piece of the puzzle of American class formation but also a cause and consequence of these other underlying forces of class disruption” (2019: 21). One can’t overstate the importance of this piece to the long puzzling over the relative strength of the American working class. Moody draws on his deep knowledge of the period, as well as the most cited and relevant scholars of it, to begin his study thinking about class consciousness. Toggling back and forth between sources as varied as E. P. Thompson, Leon Fink, Senate hearing documents, and labor newspapers from the 1870s to the 1890s, Moody provides an expansive and detailed map of the decades in question before turning to the missing factor of internal migration. Putting together the movement of masses across the continent and into cities with the rise of class violence, Moody transforms how geographic mobility influenced rates of unionization and party formation. Showing how mass migration developed in relation to economic cycles of depression, he turns to data about regional net migration in the United States across the last three decades of the 19th century, including the South. He distinguishes employment and unemployment trends in the period from other eras, compares the United States to the United Kingdom, and unwinds casual assumptions about whether unemployment led to migration (not necessarily). Beyond the “sheer size” of the United States (Moody, 2019: 79), uneven accumulation and formation of a “permanent class of wage earners” were decisive to pushing workers from one place to another (Moody, 2019: 80). The economy was chaotic, and workers searched for stability. Moody makes use of many primary sources to document how contemporaries described the migration in question, which many felt “inevitable” (2019: 91). There are excellent summaries of how skilled and unskilled workers fared, and how workers in different industries experienced the conflicts at hand. Further, the “tramp or the migrant was as likely to be a transplanted European as a native-born American” (Moody, 2019: 116). The last two major chapters in the book apply the thesis directly to the question of organized labor and strikes during the era. We learn, for example, that interstate migration reached its peak during the 1880s, just as worker insurgencies increased; moreover, the “correlation between rising migration and falling Knights membership strongly suggests a causal link” that suggests other explanations, like the Haymarket riot and repression, may have been less decisive than previously thought (Moody, 2019: 124). This link changes traditional accounts for the Knights decline. Failed strikes could also lead to migration, too, as shown in studies of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Combined with uneven accumulation and capitalist 6 Critical Sociology 00(0) repression, migrating workers made organized labor “an uphill struggle” (Moody, 2019: 147). Moody layers this argument into related explanations for independent working-class political parties. The collapse of unions after 1873 and crushing of the 1877 general strike, for example, led to migration that allowed the Greenback Party to fall into the hands of middle-class farmers, limiting the ability of workers to form either unions or parties. The ultimate failure of the US labor movement to achieve the victories seen in Europe came down to “the unusually high level of geographic mobility of the US working class as well as to a rising arc of state intervention and racial exclusion” (Moody, 2019: 175). In his conclusion, Moody deepens the ways his thesis informs arguments that emphasize racial and ethnic divisions as the “central causes of labor’s weakness” (2019: 181). However complimentary Robert Ovetz’s magisterial When Workers Shot Back might be to Moody’s project, one doesn’t complete it with a sense of labor’s weakness. In a rather stunning synthesis that looks at major episodes of class violence from 1877 to 1921, Ovetz brings a new framework to understanding when and why violence occurred. Through what he calls a “trajectory theory of violence,” Ovetz turns to the actual tactics and strategies workers used at key moments of class conflict and analyzes how their self-organization “recompose[s] working-class power in light of the existing composition of capital” (2019: 3). He then examines how capital redesigns its own tactics as a result, and recomposes itself to maintain class power. Ovetz is interested in when workers become insurgents, and then also in how trajectory theory can help explain how insurgents perceive the possibility of making gains, or not, as a result of using violence. The creativity of Ovetz’s framing devastates reactionary and liberal histories and ideologies that can only see spontaneity, madness, and chaos in such violence. Relying on a range of scholars in his introduction and throughout, particularly Charles Tilly, Ovetz tactfully manages to mesh trajectory theory into prior accounts of class violence. For him, workers contested capital throughout the period, constantly reorganizing and trying to win mass support through new tactics. Identifying how workers employed tactics to pursue particular strategies at particular times, Ovetz argues workers “use a strategy of tension in which each new tactic is chosen with the intent of gradually ratcheting up the tension that provides leverage to achieve one’s objectives” (2019: 14). Insurgents used violence to overcome obstacles, counter threats, and achieve goals. Understanding the context for violent strikes, not just the strikes themselves, thus becomes critical to his project. This also helps account for the text’s length, which, at almost 600 pages, Ovetz organizes into three parts: the 1877 general strike, the 1894 Pullman strike, and, treated separately, the rank-and-file revolts of iron workers, the World War I wildcat strike wave, the Seattle general strikes, and the West Virginia mine war. His introduction cogently summarizes his major claims for readers interested in adding the text to classroom syllabi. In Part I, Ovetz successfully charts how the very size and economic power of the railroads after the Civil War gave workers “immense disruptive power” (2019: 44), which they expressed in 1877 at the nadir of the decade’s depression. His account explains why Pittsburgh became such an explosive site; there, the strikers demonstrated “an ability to rapidly reorganize [sic] and a willingness to escalate their tactics in light of the opportunities of rapidly growing mass support” (Ovetz, 2019: 62). He thoroughly traces the strike’s epic unfolding across a dozen states, captioning descriptions of each episode with fitting analysis within trajectory theory. After such a narration, Ovetz spends another chapter relating Tilly’s theory of contention, in which insurgents “use a rational assessment” of power, mass support, and other factors to decide on how and when to escalate or deescalate their tactics. Here, he ranges across the strike’s many episodes to also examine worker demands and actions, recasting the legacy of the strike on future strikes and figuring his analysis into the work of previous scholars like David Montgomery and Phillip Foner. He then shifts to describing and explaining capital’s reaction, stressing the mobilization of militias and the military, state and local policing, and the new use of federal receivership to authorize blanket injunctions. His long take also looks Rogers-Cooper 7 ahead to legislative regulation and welfare policies, as well as to the consolidation of industrial corporations, which Ovetz argues was partly a reaction to the threat of worker disruption. Moreover, Ovetz pays special attention to the contributions of women and African Americans, and his long discussion of St. Louis and the unique events there with the Workingmen’s Party make healthy contributions to a still important thread in 1877 scholarship (see below). His insistence that it’s “inaccurate” to call 1877 a “railroad strike” (Ovetz, 2019: 112) when it involved so many in the industrial working-class underscores why other scholars, including myself, conceive it as a general strike. In Part II, Ovetz treats the 1894 Pullman strike with equal depth. Documenting how workers of the American Railway Union (ARU) learned from the success of prior strikes (especially the strike wave of 1884–1886), he shows how the ARU’s open policy toward workers of all skills allowed them to build a strong base, but also how its exclusionary racial policy and focus on railroad workers limited its mass support. Yet in 1894, as in 1877, workers were nonetheless still able to “gain the mass support necessary to force their will on their ever more powerful adversary” (Ovetz, 2019: 207). Relating the immediate context of the Pullman corporation and the ARU, Ovetz isolates the “key lesson” of the 1894 strike turned on the efficacy of an “organized national union,” which ensured neither if a strike could be successfully called “let alone won” (2019: 221). He discusses the role of the General Managers Association (GMA), an organization of railroad corporations that coordinated anti-strike actions, as part of capital’s recomposition of itself in reply to the strike. He supplements this with the federal intervention into the strike by the Army, deputy marshals, and the further use of the injunction, arguing that the intervention absorbed key costs of the strike by the struggling railroad companies, but also “stimulated tremendous mass support for the strike” (Ovetz, 2019: 238). He clarifies why what began as a nonviolent boycott escalated into violence as its leaders, like Eugene Debs, were arrested. Comparing it to the 1877 strike, he shows why both strikes ended in similar ways (in trajectory theory terms, due to rising costs of insurgency and narrowing opportunities for workers). His detailed reading of the 1895 US Strike Commission report, and especially its discussion of the use of presidential power to mobilize troops against workers using Article IV Section 4 of the US Constitution, is a significant contribution to scholarship. He also looks ahead to the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World as one vector of class power that materialized after 1894, while also accounting for the rise of arbitration boards and the management strategies of union leadership such as American Federation of Labor (AFL). Part III of When Workers Shot Back addresses events that are probably less well known outside labor history. The industrial war between US Steel and the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers (IABSIW) included a union bombing campaign and attacks on property without mass support, a factor Ovetz highlights in his assessment of why it proved ineffective. After the IABSIW launched a national strike in 1903, employers reorganized their National Erectors’ Association (NEA). The combined resources that funded the aggressive tactics of the NEA, including private police and agent provocateurs who actually carried out some of the bombing, proved to be a decisive advantage. Yet, Ovetz carefully explains how the union’s own actions could contradict its goals. Unlike other AFL unions, though, the IABSIW was willing to escalate its tactics to violence. The IABSIW’s bombing campaign continued until the 1910 explosion at the Los Angeles Times building. Ovetz’s originality shines here, as he rejects moralizing explanations for understanding class violence; instead, he analyzes why force does and doesn’t work to advance goals and relays how the “uncompromising attitude” of US Steel and other employers gave insurgents an incentive to use violence (2019: 349). In subsequent chapters, Ovetz recalculates how labor responded to the mandatory arbitration of the labor-planning state during World War I, including with the National War Labor Board (NWLB), and how the dire necessity of wartime production gave workers immense leverage “overnight” (2019: 369). With opportunities for disruption everywhere, workers dramatically escalated their 8 Critical Sociology 00(0) participation in wildcat strikes, many of them in sympathy with each other. The NWLB in turn tried to “smother them in complex layers of bureaucracy,” while at the same time effectively supporting a national minimum wage (Ovetz, 2019: 393, 402). After the war, there were new battles to try and reset the norms, including the Red Scare and assaults by the FBI’s Radical Division. Ovetz connects this new era of conflict to the 1919 steel strike, the Seattle General Strike, and the West Virginia mine war that broke out in 1920. His attention to the ferocity of violence by the miners and US troops, which included the presence of fighter-bomber biplanes and Martin bombers, underscores why trajectory theory is especially helpful to explaining how an “armed insurgency” materialized (Ovetz, 2019: 514), and how “[p]lutocratic control at all levels” raised the costs of escalation and de-escalation so that “total defeat” was possible either way. Miners thus turned to insurgency to try and change the situation for more leverage and to increase the costs for capital. The ability for employers to socialize their costs through government, however, once again proved critical. Early in The Great Cowboy Strike, Lause connects state violence to the legal impunities of Southern lynchings in a manner that amplifies the racial character of the plutocratic control Ovetz so meticulously traces. Such “coercive violence,” Lause argues, was actually a “systemic feature of social control” more broadly, characterized by “racial violence aimed at indigenous peoples (and African Americans)” as well as “foreigners” (2017: x). While Moody might disagree about the ultimate significance of this violence to the “success” of the American working class, Lause’s insight points back to Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (Du Bois, 1935), a text that informs Ovetz’s links between class conflict and Reconstruction (2019: 39, 53, 134, 233, 526). Their insights indicate important threads for future scholars. Du Bois describes Reconstruction’s failure as more than a lack of Northern military support for Southern black Republicans: “the appeal of property in the South got the ear of property in the North” (Du Bois, 1935: 581). Framing the process as a kind of thermidor, Du Bois defines what he calls the counterrevolution of property in stark terms: “the overthrow of Reconstruction was in essence a revolution inspired by property, and not a race war” (1935: 622). As Ovetz notes, Du Bois reminds us that Southern Reconstruction and Northern class conflict were not separate projects. Subsequent histories in an independent Marxist tradition (Allen, 1937: 207–215; Camejo, 1976: 175–187) burnished many of the ideas in Black Reconstruction, but it still remains rare for scholars of industrial class conflict to actually integrate Reconstruction into their studies, although it happens, as we see in Moody’s text, for other reasons. Indeed, Foner (1990: 199) aptly argues the Northern United States aborted its own “social transformation” after the Civil War, one he calls the “North’s reconstruction.” In short, after 1873 the need to sustain profits with cheap labor overwhelmed all other national concerns. All the reconstructions—north, south, east, and west—would need to be smothered. To the point, John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov (2015: 242) argue that class relations in post–Civil War Chicago, including the 1877 general strike, should be conceived “in the rise to national dominance of capitalism” that includes the “context of Reconstruction, which is commonly viewed by historians as a Southern question.” Despite this gesture, they share Moody’s notion that capitalism rose to national dominance during this period, as if the antebellum slave economy (or postwar sharecropping) wasn’t capitalism. Echoing an emerging and promising trend in scholarship loosely figured as new histories of capitalism and slavery (Beckert and Rockman, 2016; Hyman and Baptist, 2017; Rosenthal, 2018), scholars like Scott Huffard Jr. point to new directions for framing the period (2019: 5), writing that we should “see the Old South as a site of capitalist disaster,” and the “New South not as an aberration, but as a function of untrammeled capitalism.” For his part, Du Bois was already practicing the new history of capitalism, but his work perhaps assumes the “Northern white worker” as too stable a category (1935: 359), though he alludes to an undertheorized idea of “anti-foreign immigration.” This third space between the sometimes rather fixed categories of the white worker and the black worker points to a heterogeneity of population, 9 Rogers-Cooper and the contingency of whiteness, in the composition of the racialized working class that Lause, Moody, and Ovetz track in their own ways. Gates fully grasps how antiblack racism became essential to the new hegemony, but his account stops short of forcing readers to fully grapple with what Ovetz and Lause state plainly about US capitalism. Yet readers might still wish for different theorizations of racial capitalism in all these texts. Cedric Robinson (1983: 188–189) contends it was precisely during the 1870s that “racialism was reattired so that it might once again take its place among the inventory of labor disciplines.” He rightfully attests that Du Bois later turns to this period to contextualize the “racial violence in the labor movement of the twentieth century” (1983: 202), a point the black socialist Hubert Harrison made years before Du Bois (1917). This revision is crucial for several reasons. For one, Jim Crow racial capitalism renewed its formations in different times and places, just as Ovetz suggests about industrial capitalism as a whole. The political economy of Jim Crow continually reproduced itself in ways not visible to scholars who conceive of it distinct from capitalism, too, including through mass murder, white riots, looting, and accumulation by dispossession (Ash, 2013; Egerton, 2014; Gilmore, 1998; Hirsch, 2002; McKoy, 2001; Rable, 1984; Richardson, 2001; Williams, 2013). Further, the disciplining of a racialized working class was accompanied, as Robinson notes, by new racisms that targeted Europeans, the Chinese, and the indigenous, among others (Day, 2016; Wong, 2015). Whatever their origins from above, these racisms also were reproduced from below, but not as a rule. The cultural and class norms about racial identity reflected real tensions among workers, but also point to the contingency of whiteness for racialized migrant industrial laborers. We can see such contingency in the fact that the white nationalist press characterized the 1877 strikers as Indian savages (Slotkin, 1994: 480), for example. At the same time, we have yet to fully incorporate a history of U.S. class conflict within the imperial context of state violence in the nineteenth century against indigenous peoples—indeed, such claims raise “key questions over the status or role that racialized migrants play within white settler colonialism [that] often remain unasked or avoided” (Day, 2016: 19). In questions that cut directly to the heart of the relation between the state, property, and class relations, the full history of the worker as settler has yet to be incorporated into studies of violent class warfare during the era. The appeals for nationalization of the telegraphs and railroads by various worker and populist movements, for example, as well as the demands for welfare and progressive taxation, have yet to be fully reconciled with the actions of the federal government against indigenous populations on the continent and in the Americas beyond. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by Lincoln’s authorization of the largest execution in US history in 1862, the mass lynching of 38 Dakota Indians, during the Civil War—just seven months after the Homestead Act passed. The primitive accumulation of indigenous land turned over to the railroads would have remained stolen even after nationalization. Scholarship that seeks to build on the exceptional contributions by the authors here might one day take up such questions. Declaration of Conflicting Interest The author declares that there is no conflict of interest. Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. ORCID iD Justin Rogers-Cooper https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7133-310X 10 Critical Sociology 00(0) References Allen J (1937, 1963) Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy 1865–1876. New York, NY: International Publishers. 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