Our current general economic crisis at a time of very concentrated wealth and extreme income inequality has its own peculiar features, but in broad outline it is by no means new. Such crises have afflicted all levels of our government for centuries. During our nineteenth century’s Gilded Age, the emerging trusts exercised an almost unchallenged rule over the private-sector workplace and government at all levels. The labor movement then—both unions and radicals—was very weak, and it was relatively easy for ruling elites to address a crisis by shifting its burden onto workers and local communities.

There were, of course, some real struggles to break the success of these relentless capitalist offensives: the great rail strikes of 1877, 1884, and 1894; the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892; turn-of-the-century coal- and copper-mining struggles; and, in 1886, the beginning of labor’s half-century fight for the eight-hour day—a revolutionary concept at a time when the workday ranged from ten to fourteen hours. Unions also fought for legislation against child labor and (egregiously) against women’s right to work nights and operate some machinery. Many of these battles were lost, but they planted the seeds of a major reversal in the relationship of political and social forces between capital and labor. Meanwhile, their failure to pass and thus mitigate the extreme concentration of wealth and curb the reckless accumulation of further wealth set the stage for the crash of 1929 that launched the Great Depression.