Confronting the Barons

This chapter evaluates how the fundamental question of whether business interests bore responsibility for attracting pernicious foreigners dominated the 1890s. Personal connections, such as the one between Andrew Carnegie and his steel empire, characterized the decade's labor disputes. Commercial growth and the trend toward consolidation had created large conglomerates, which seemed to signify the nation's coming of age. Even so, recurring class violence affected some of the nation's largest and most prominent businesses and cast a pall upon this glittery milieu. Here was the essence of the Gilded Age, incredible opulence coupled with unsightly social unrest. Against this backdrop, Americans of the 1890s struggled to understand why such incidents seemed to occur with increasing frequency. In the minds of angry workers, fault lay with the economic barons, but those barons and their supporters saw things differently, placing responsibility on the very immigrant employees upon whom their companies relied to meet their labor needs. Employers' only transgression seemed to be their unfortunate hiring of alien subversives.