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Timeline - The 1930s
The decade begin in depression, which dug so deep into the soul and conscience of the nation that only a World War could really make a dent in its depth. Franklin Roosevelt dominated the decade and more with a presidency that saw us through that war and brought us many of the Great Society programs we have today.
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Timeline
1938 - Detail
June 25, 1938 - The National Minimum Wage is signed into law within the federal legislation known as the Fair Labor Standards Act. It established a minimum wage of $0.25 at the time, as well as time and one half for overtime and the prohibition of most employment for minors.
Jason Donovan, Author
Throughout American history, the amount of a person’s pay for a particular job was
what “the market will bear.” The history of the struggle to gain a minimum wage. For centuries,
guilds and unions have had a hand in setting the wage earned by particular trades and
occupations. Legislation dealing with wages has adapted as the country has developed. As
time passed, there was a race to the bottom of wages and working conditions. Racing to the
bottom created undue hardship and pain, sparking strikes and protests, many ending in
violence. As a result of the Depression, the New Deal introduced the Fair Labor Standards Act,
setting the first federal minimum wage law in United States history.
As the 18th century gave way to pre-Civil War America, the bipolar economic mood
swings created the perfect incubator for the growth of the American labor movement. There
were many economic booms and busts as the United States convulsed in the growing pains of
the change of would-be farmers and small business owners becoming instead-earning
employees. In the early 1800s, Lowell, Massachusetts, for instance, drew many young women
from farming families to run the machines in the textile factories. The rise of industries such as coal mining, a myriad of manufacturing jobs,
and the working conditions that came along with them allowed the labor movement to continue
growing. Yet, all the while, the turmoil in both the economic and political arenas was hurdling
the country off a cliff, shattering it upon the rocks below. Death came knock knocking at
Americas’ chamber door.
The Civil War was powered by the blood, sweat, and tears of immigrants from around
the world. Starting in the 1820s till the 1840s, roughly 250,000 Irish immigrants came to
America due to the British government revoking the land rights of Irish, primarily Catholic,
farmers. By 1860, primarily due to the desperation of the Great Irish Famine, 1.7 million Irish
had immigrated to America. Records show that by 1865 nearly one of eight Americans had been born outside of the USA. The Irish
were just one group that came searching for a better life. 1.5 million German immigrants arrived
during the same timeframe. Over the course of the war, 200,000 Irish enlisted in the Union,
while 20,000-40,000 enlisted in the Confederate Army. Another 200,000 Germans
enlisted in either army; twenty-five percent of all Union soldiers were immigrants. In stark
contrast, in the Confederate army, only five percent were immigrants.
Post-Civil War America experienced rapid industrialization, and with a saturation of
immigrants in the labor market, wages and working conditions dropped, which increased labor
union activity. The unions would go on strike for better pay and working conditions. Still, the
robber barons of the age squeezed their workers as a way of offsetting their losses accrued
during the many economic crises and panics that continued to cast a dark shadow of misery
over America’s working class. Workers are willing to be pushed only so far. The railroad and
coal mining companies employed a large portion of the workforce.
The Public Reacts With Strikes
The railroad’s profit-driven tunnel vision caused pain and suffering, affecting the railway
workers and everyone. From the many wage cuts for workers to the high fees charged to carry
farmers’ produce as the railroad owners attempted to offset their losses caused by the financial
depression of 1873. After the owner’s cartel cut wages twice between 1873 and 1877,
they cut half their employees, thus pushing those left to do double the work. These changes
set in motion the events that would transpire over the course of the strike as it spread from its
epicenter of Martinsburg, West Virginia, to cities and towns throughout the Northeast and
Midwestern regions of the country. Railroad workers were not the only group to participate in
the action. A wide range of professions joined the strike in solidarity. The Great Strike
succeeded partly due to the public’s sympathy for the workers’ situation and the treatment of
the strikers and their families. An example of the brutality visited on the strikers was on full
display on 21 July in Pittsburgh, PA, when a militia opened fire on the protesters, killing 20,
including three small children. The robber barons’ brutal reaction was only one of the reasons the public supported the strike; the second was
that the public blamed the railroads for causing the depression.
The Great Strike was one of many strikes and other labor actions over the years to
come. The Haymarket Tragedy occurred on 4 May 1886 in Chicago. The Haymarket affair was
a peaceful gathering “… of organized industrial workers against the oppressive conditions of an
early urban-industrial market." The Haymarket Tragedy transpired amid a battle of
the social classes, opposing political ideologies, boycotts, and strikes. There was a fault line
that formed in the social landscape. It would be only a matter of time till the built-up tension
would, with the inclusion of bad decisions, fatally, explosively release all the pent-up emotions
of the city of Chicago. By 4 May, there had been peaceful protests and strikes by tens of
thousands of workers.
The political struggle between capitalists, anarchists, and everyone in between was, at
that time, predominantly one for the eight-hour workday was being pushed to a breaking point.
A meeting in Haymarket Square was called for the fourth. The meeting drew 3,000 workers, and
all was peaceful. Chicago Mayor Harrison spoke at the event and said it was tame. As a
result, the mayor told the police reserves to go home. The situation changed when the anti-
labor police inspector John Bonfield was told that the language used was inflammatory. In
response, 180 police officers were sent to disperse the remaining 300 workers. When the order
to disperse was given, anarchist speaker Samuel Fielden replied, “But we are peaceable.”
When the order was repeated, Fielden replied, “Alright, we will go.” Here is where things go
sideways. At that moment, observers noticed a flash of light. An explosion then occurred
within the assembled police officers. Then, a scene of wild carnage, the panicked police pulled out their revolvers and fired into the
crowd for nearly three minutes. The Haymarket was littered with bodies, and the street
pavement was turned red with blood. It is estimated that the police killed seven or eight
civilians in the crowd and wounded between thirty and forty others. There was little mention
and no troubling by the press over these civilian casualties.
There were roughly 72 officers wounded, and a further seven were killed. Half of the wounded
were hit by friendly fire as well as three of the seven dead officers were killed by police rounds and
bomb shrapnel, and a further three were killed by friendly fire alone. The police’s response was
overkill. Richard Schneirov shows how thick the lead flys were in the air that night when he
states, “A telephone pole removed from the scene, probably at the behest of the police, was
filled with bullets all coming from the direction of the police.”
The police conveniently did not inform the public of the friendly deaths. The strikes continued
in the slog to the minimum wage.
A strike would come in 1894 due to the actions taken by George Pullman, owner and
CEO of The Pullman Palace Car Company, to limit losses brought on by the depression of 1893. The
actions taken by the company were coercive and draconian. George Pullman had built a
company town, Pullman, Chicago. “Providing for” his employees was a sizable part of
Pullman’s economic philosophy, otherwise known as “industrial paternalism.” Pullman was the
father figure, and the employees were children. The problem with this
arrangement came to the forefront when the foreman told employees that those living outside
Pullman would be fired; as a result, two-thirds of all employees lived in Pullman. The screws
continued to tighten. While employee wages were cut by thirty percent on average, employees’
rents on company housing were not. The workers were asking for the wage to be raised to pre-cut levels. After many failed negotiations with
company officials, including Pullman himself. A strike was imminent.
On 11 May, twenty-five hundred of the thirty-one hundred workers walked out. Later
that day, the company laid off the remaining six hundred. A striker said, “We struck at Pullman
because we were without hope.” The workers would find support from the American Railway Union (ARU). Support from the ARU was vital,
as its members controlled the flow of trains west of Chicago. The ARU called for a Pullman
boycott in June. As a result, no less than 125,000 union members walked off the job in
solidarity with the Pullman workers. A turning point came on 22 June at the ARU convention in
Chicago when a vote passed calling for a “national boycott of Pullman cars to start on 26 June
if no settlement were reached.”
The national boycott began on 26 June. In less than a week, one hundred thousand
workers stopped working, completely shutting down twenty railroads. The strike would spread
to twenty-seven states, drawing in two hundred fifty thousand workers, freezing most if not all
train traffic west of Chicago. Due to the strike, the flow of mail was interrupted, thus the federal
government got involved. The Supreme Court would set the stage to the breaking of the strike.
The Court imposed an injunction to stop the boycott, citing the regulation of interstate
commerce as a purview of the federal government. After the strikers ignored the courts’
injunction, President Cleveland sent in 6,000 federal troops to enforce the Court’s ruling. These
federal troops would end up opening fire, killing at least 30 strikers.
The Pullman strike had some important firsts involved with it. The strike would be the
first time the Supreme Court used an injunction to stop a strike. The way that Pullman and the
government had handled the strike turned public opinion in favor of the strikers and unions.
This strike is the labor action that spawned the national holiday of Labor Day. The aftermath of
the strike was not kind to George Pullman. When the strike was all said and done, the public, and even his fellow robber barons,
turned against Pullman for his handling of the strike. Chicago’s citizenry came to hate Pullman
to the extent that his family buried him in an extra-thick vault to keep his remains from being
desecrated. The Pullman strike is said to be a monument to how wrong a labor
dispute can go. The public as a whole also turned against the President and the
democratic party, which was handed its worst electoral result in decades.
Reviewing the strikes covered here, one sees some common threads running through
them all. One would be the treatment of the strikers not only by the employers but also by the
government apparatus. Secondly, is the continuing issue of wages, or in most cases, lack
thereof. Third is an economic recession or depression. Above are just a few instances of the
government intervening on the side of the owners. There would have to be an economic
catastrophe for the government to intervene by enacting sweeping legislation in favor of
workers. The Great Depression would provide such a catastrophe.
Effects of the Depression On Legislation
In the face of the Great Depression’s economic destruction, many laws were enacted as
part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. The National Industrial Recovery Act(NIRA) was one
such law. The NIRA established the National Recovery Agency (NRA). The NRA was an agency had the power to push for voluntary agreements about work conditions and fixed
prices, drawing up more than 500 fair practice codes for industries.
The NIRA was the wellspring that would birth many of the future labor-related
legislation. The government’s ability to set these codes and their enforcement would be its
downfall. NIRA’s end came on 27 May 1935. On this day, the Supreme Court struck down this
law as giving the executive branch too much legislative power to regulate intrastate commerce
when Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States was decided against the government. The pushing and pulling between the branches of
government are just how the system is designed to work. Even though NIRA did not stand up
to the Court’s scrutiny, other forthcoming laws would.
The first attempt at a bill started on 24 May 1937 when President Roosevelt sent his
first attempt to Congress with a message that all working Americans should get “a fair day’s
pay for a fair day’s work.” He continued, “A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can
plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling worker’s
wages or stretching workers’ hours.” Roosevelt clarified his position by stating that interstate commerce created “conditions that do not meet rudimentary standards of
decency should be regarded as contraband and ought not to be allowed to pollute the
channels of interstate trade.” This first attempt was sponsored by Alabama Senator Hugo
Black and Massachusetts Representative William P. Connery. The basic tenants of the
legislation included a minimum wage of $.40 per hour, a minimum age of 16 with exemptions
for certain industries outside of mining and manufacturing, and the hard-fought 40-hour
workweek. With such a hard-fought battle and a victory in the Senate, where the bill passed
56-28 on 31 July 1937, the bill would be smothered in the House Rules Committee. The fight
was just beginning.
Having fractured the Democratic Party with his court-packing fiasco, the President saw
an opening to reunite the party in a special congressional session to take on the same issues
as the last regular session. On the President’s second go around, some of the opposition said
their objections started with the bill itself, calling it “a bad bill badly drawn.” Despite the
relentless work of the chair of the House Labor Committee, New Jersey congresswoman Mary
Norton, the bill would be sent back to the Labor Committee by a floor vote of 218-198.
Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins pointed out that this was a horrible first for the President
when she said, “This was the first time that a major administration bill had been defeated on the floor of the
House. The press took the view that this was the death knell of wage-hour legislation as well
as a decisive blow to the PPresident’s prestige.”
Roosevelt would not stay down. On 3 January 1938, the President used his annual address to Congress to lay out his
position. Couching his opinion in a capitalist context by using the purchasing power of the
average citizen. Roosevelt’s words paint a picture of how the web of poverty spreads out to
touch all aspects of a person’s life. Tying together the reality of millions of workers who,
“receive pay so low that they have little buying power. Aside from the undoubted fact
that they thereby suffer great human hardship, they are unable to buy adequate food and
shelter, to maintain health or to buy their share of manufactured goods.”
The President continued to make his point by stating the obvious upside, especially to a
depression-era government, taxes—the connection between an individual’s wage and the
government’s ability to function properly. Roosevelt used property values to localize the issue.
Low-wage areas hurt the local economy through low property values. For most local and state
governments were, and still are, funded by property taxes. There are many other benefits or
opportunities that the President believed would be brought about with the implementation of
the minimum wage along with his other labor initiatives. Continuing with his address to
Congress, Roosevelt noted that there had been aid extended to the nation’s agricultural sector,
and he indicated that he believed that similar types of assistance should be set aside for the
country’s industrial workers as well. As this portion of his speech wrapped up and moved on to
other topics, he drove home his point of view that, in order to stimulate the nation’s economic
recovery, the average citizen’s purchasing power must be raised. Congress may be a fickle
mistress, so to speak. Hence, the President relied on those in his administration to help him
push his agenda. Such as his Labor Secretary Francis Perkins.
As Secretary of Labor, Francis Perkins was an integral part of the realization of The New Deal. Perkins was known for her ability to work with people from across the political spectrum.
She was committed to working tirelessly for workers’ safety and well-being, quite possibly as a
result of being a witness to the horrors of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Witnessing
these horrors, coupled with her social work training, work history, and personality, created a
person whose talents matched the needs of a particular time in history as the Secretary of
Labor. Perkins would be an intricate part of the negotiations involved with many
groundbreaking social programs of the era. The Fair Labor Standards Act established the first
federal minimum wage. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), signed by President Roosevelt on 25
June 1938, had taken a year’s worth of wrangling, wheeling and dealing on Capitol Hill. The
FLSA set minimum standards regulating child labor, a minimum wage, and capped the work week at 44 hours a week. The 40-hour workweek was not made the standard until 1940. The first minimum wage was $ .25 an hour ($5.55 circa 2024). There had been a years’ worth of
back and forth between Capitol Hill and the White House.
The FLSA set the wage, but it also included overtime pay, record keeping, and
youth employment standards effecting employees in the private sector and in Federal, State,
and local governments. The law’s child labor provisions made certain jobs off-limits, such as meat processing and mining, to list just two. This part of the
legislation was designed to get children out of work and into school. For the rest of the
population the FLSA also created two categories of Non-exempt and Exempt workers.
Exempt workers are workers who receive a salary that’s not tied to the number of
hours they work in a week. On the other hand, non-exempt employees are paid 1.5 times
their hourly wage for all hours worked over 40 hrs in one week, thereby establishing overtime pay in federal law. The law requires employees to document their time at work. What is considered work, in this context, is set out in the law as well. Covered activities are, in today’s world: Breaks, Tasks done at home or remotely, Work done over lunch, Coming in early or staying late, Phone calls, emails, or texts answered while away from the job site,
Training, Travel time if doing work while traveling, picking up items off-site, or transporting items or people for work-related purposes.
There had been other attempts to implement a minimum wage over the years. All of
these prior efforts were struck down by the Supreme Court. That is until the case of West
Coast Hotel Co. V. Parrish. This 1937 decision stemmed from a Washington State minimum
wage law setting a wage for women and minors. Parrish was a hotel housekeeper whose
employer refused to pay the state minimum wage of $14.50 per 48-hour workweek ($325.24 in
2025). With a 5-4 decision for Parrish, the Court marked a monumental shift away from striking
down legislation that regulated business. This case is one that shows the power of one
justice’s vote when one realizes that “While Justice Hughes wrote the opinion, the stark doctrinal shift resulted from Justice
Owen Josephus Roberts changing his perspective on this issue. According to Hughes,
President Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936 and the impressive achievements of the New
Deal caused Roberts to abandon his affiliation with the Court’s conservative justices.”
One person’s change of opinion completely changed the course of modern labor.
The Fair Labor Standards Act was the first time in our nation’s history that a piece of
federal legislation laid out the concepts within as rights, not privileges. As a society, the act and
the rights it has enshrined have become an integral aspect of most American’s working lives.
As the United States moves forward down the path of time may we remember the sacrifices of
life and limb that were paid by our forerunners. As society continues to struggle to maintain a
balance between the interests of both capital and labor, may we not forget the pain of the past
so the blood of the future is not worthlessly shed.
Photo above: Political cartoon from the Chicago Labor newspaper from July 7, 1894 about labor at the Pullman Company, 1894, Chicago Labor Newspaper. Courtesy Wikipedia Commons. Below: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt touting New Deal acts on radio broadcast, 1940, Harris and Ewing. Courtesy Library of Congress. Info Source: “National Industrial Recovery Act (1933).” National Archives, 2021; DeSimone, Bailey. “From the Serial Set: The History of the Minimum Wage: In Custodia Legis.”; The Library of Congress, 2020; “Frances Perkins | AFL-CIO.” Aflcio.org; H_Wotan. “History of Wages in the United States from Colonial Times to 1928.” Scribd, 2024; The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Wagner Act | Summary, History, & Facts.” 2018; Morris, Richard B. “Chapter 1: The Emergence of American Labor by Richard B. Morris | U.S. Department of Labor.” 2019; Suranyi, Anna. "Indentured Servitude in Colonial America." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. 2024. Oxford University Press; Blank, Rebecca M., and Claudia Goldin. “Understanding the Gender Gap.” Economica, 1992; “Labor and Labor Movements | Encyclopedia.com; Jacksonville, Florida State College at, and Cynthia Gardner Counsil. “The Rise of Industrial Labor in Antebellum America.” Fscj.pressbooks.pub; Atterberry, Tara. “The Irish in the American Civil War.” Gale Blog: Library & Educator News, 2021; “Immigrants in the Union Army.” Edspace.american.edu; “Notable Labor Strikes of the Gilded Age.” Faculty.weber.edu; “Image 7 of the New York Herald (New York [N.Y.]), 1877.”; The Library
of Congress, 2015; Adamczyk, Joseph. “Great Railroad Strike of 1877 | History, Facts, & Significance.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 2018; Piper, Jessica.”The Great Railroad Strike of 1877: A Catalyst for the America Labor Movement”;
“The Dramas of Haymarket. A Web Site Review for the Journal for MultiMedia History, Volume 3 (2000).” Www.albany.edu; Schneirov, Richard . “The Haymarket Bomb in Historical Context | Northern
Illinois University Digital Library.” Digital.lib.niu.edu; “Jane Addams and the 1894 Pullman Strike.” Social Welfare History Project, 2015; National Constitution Center. “On This Day, the Pullman Strike Changes Labor
Law - National Constitution Center.” National Constitution Center, 2019; Tyler, Ray. “Big Trouble in a Company Town: The Pullman Strike.” Teaching American History, 2020; Rosefield, Jayne, Critical Moment-Brunswick Review Issue 13 - Workforce 2017; Payne-Patterson, Jasmine, and Adewale A. Maye. “A History of the Federal Minimum Wage: 85 Years Later, the Minimum Wage Is far from Equitable.” Economic Policy Institute, 2023; “Fair Labor Standards Act Definition | Britannica Money.”; “Britannica Money.” Britannica.com, 2024; “On This Day, Supreme Court Invalidates Key FDR Program - National Constitution Center.” National Constitution Center – Constitutioncenter.org, 2021;
“A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. V. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935).” Justia Law; The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Schechter Poultry Corp. V. United States | Law Case.” 2018; Works Cited “Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum - Our Documents.” Marist.edu, 2019; FDR Library. “FDR: From Budget Balancer to Keynesian - FDR Presidential Library & Museum.” Fdrlibrary.org, 2016; hilaryparkinson. “A Factory Fire and Frances Perkins.” Pieces of History, 2011; U.S. Department of Labor. “Wages and the Fair Labor Standards Act.” U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of Labor; Murphy, Margaret. “The Constitutionality of Minimum Wage: The Legal Battles of Elsie Parrish and Frances Perkins for a Fair Day's Pay” Princeton Historical Review 2021-22; Team, Content. “West Coast Hotel Co. V. Parrish - Case Summary and Case Brief.”
Legal Dictionary, 2019; Oyez. “West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish.”; Pictures & Tables Minimum Wage Bibliography, U.S. Department of Labor. “Consolidated Minimum Wage Table | U.S. Department
of Labor.” 2023.
History Photo Bomb
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who served four terms as
President. Courtesy National Archives.
Out of work workers during the Great Depression. Courtesy National Archives.
Timeline Book
During the decade of the 1930's, World's Fairs of various sizes were held throughout the United States to stimulate the local economies as public works projects to pull the country out of depression. They were also used a public confidence projects to buoy the spirit of a nation in economic turmoil.
Chicago 1933-4
San Diego 1935-6
Cleveland 1936-7
Dallas 1936-7
New York 1939-40
San Francisco 1939-40
ABH Travel Tip
Take the time to listen, not only to the guides at the various historic sites you visit, but also to the ambiance around the sites themselves. Imagine yourself back in time. It's easier to do in the early morning or evening when crowds are low and the bustle lessened, but it can be a wonderful experience to imagine for yourself the past that happened on the ground where you stand. Above photo, the salient at Spotsylvania Battlefield, Virginia.
Night view of the Trylon and Perisphere at the New York World's Fair of 1939-40, 1939, New York Daily News, Courtesy Pinterest. During the first year of the fair, World War II would start.
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Throughout American history, the amount of a person’s pay for a particular job was what “the market will bear.” The history of the struggle to gain a minimum wage. For centuries, guilds and unions have had a hand in setting the wage earned by particular trades and occupations. Legislation dealing with wages has adapted as the country has developed. As time passed, there was a race to the bottom of wages and working conditions. Racing to the bottom created undue hardship and pain, sparking strikes and protests, many ending in violence. As a result of the Depression, the New Deal introduced the Fair Labor Standards Act, setting the first federal minimum wage law in United States history.
As the 18th century gave way to pre-Civil War America, the bipolar economic mood swings created the perfect incubator for the growth of the American labor movement. There were many economic booms and busts as the United States convulsed in the growing pains of the change of would-be farmers and small business owners becoming instead-earning employees. In the early 1800s, Lowell, Massachusetts, for instance, drew many young women from farming families to run the machines in the textile factories. The rise of industries such as coal mining, a myriad of manufacturing jobs, and the working conditions that came along with them allowed the labor movement to continue growing. Yet, all the while, the turmoil in both the economic and political arenas was hurdling the country off a cliff, shattering it upon the rocks below. Death came knock knocking at Americas’ chamber door.
The Civil War was powered by the blood, sweat, and tears of immigrants from around the world. Starting in the 1820s till the 1840s, roughly 250,000 Irish immigrants came to America due to the British government revoking the land rights of Irish, primarily Catholic, farmers. By 1860, primarily due to the desperation of the Great Irish Famine, 1.7 million Irish had immigrated to America. Records show that by 1865 nearly one of eight Americans had been born outside of the USA. The Irish were just one group that came searching for a better life. 1.5 million German immigrants arrived during the same timeframe. Over the course of the war, 200,000 Irish enlisted in the Union, while 20,000-40,000 enlisted in the Confederate Army. Another 200,000 Germans enlisted in either army; twenty-five percent of all Union soldiers were immigrants. In stark contrast, in the Confederate army, only five percent were immigrants.
Post-Civil War America experienced rapid industrialization, and with a saturation of immigrants in the labor market, wages and working conditions dropped, which increased labor union activity. The unions would go on strike for better pay and working conditions. Still, the robber barons of the age squeezed their workers as a way of offsetting their losses accrued during the many economic crises and panics that continued to cast a dark shadow of misery over America’s working class. Workers are willing to be pushed only so far. The railroad and coal mining companies employed a large portion of the workforce.
The Great Strike was one of many strikes and other labor actions over the years to come. The Haymarket Tragedy occurred on 4 May 1886 in Chicago. The Haymarket affair was a peaceful gathering “… of organized industrial workers against the oppressive conditions of an early urban-industrial market." The Haymarket Tragedy transpired amid a battle of the social classes, opposing political ideologies, boycotts, and strikes. There was a fault line that formed in the social landscape. It would be only a matter of time till the built-up tension would, with the inclusion of bad decisions, fatally, explosively release all the pent-up emotions of the city of Chicago. By 4 May, there had been peaceful protests and strikes by tens of thousands of workers.
The political struggle between capitalists, anarchists, and everyone in between was, at that time, predominantly one for the eight-hour workday was being pushed to a breaking point. A meeting in Haymarket Square was called for the fourth. The meeting drew 3,000 workers, and all was peaceful. Chicago Mayor Harrison spoke at the event and said it was tame. As a result, the mayor told the police reserves to go home. The situation changed when the anti- labor police inspector John Bonfield was told that the language used was inflammatory. In response, 180 police officers were sent to disperse the remaining 300 workers. When the order to disperse was given, anarchist speaker Samuel Fielden replied, “But we are peaceable.” When the order was repeated, Fielden replied, “Alright, we will go.” Here is where things go sideways. At that moment, observers noticed a flash of light. An explosion then occurred within the assembled police officers. Then, a scene of wild carnage, the panicked police pulled out their revolvers and fired into the crowd for nearly three minutes. The Haymarket was littered with bodies, and the street pavement was turned red with blood. It is estimated that the police killed seven or eight civilians in the crowd and wounded between thirty and forty others. There was little mention and no troubling by the press over these civilian casualties.
There were roughly 72 officers wounded, and a further seven were killed. Half of the wounded were hit by friendly fire as well as three of the seven dead officers were killed by police rounds and bomb shrapnel, and a further three were killed by friendly fire alone. The police’s response was overkill. Richard Schneirov shows how thick the lead flys were in the air that night when he states, “A telephone pole removed from the scene, probably at the behest of the police, was filled with bullets all coming from the direction of the police.”
The police conveniently did not inform the public of the friendly deaths. The strikes continued in the slog to the minimum wage.
A strike would come in 1894 due to the actions taken by George Pullman, owner and CEO of The Pullman Palace Car Company, to limit losses brought on by the depression of 1893. The actions taken by the company were coercive and draconian. George Pullman had built a company town, Pullman, Chicago. “Providing for” his employees was a sizable part of Pullman’s economic philosophy, otherwise known as “industrial paternalism.” Pullman was the father figure, and the employees were children. The problem with this arrangement came to the forefront when the foreman told employees that those living outside Pullman would be fired; as a result, two-thirds of all employees lived in Pullman. The screws continued to tighten. While employee wages were cut by thirty percent on average, employees’ rents on company housing were not. The workers were asking for the wage to be raised to pre-cut levels. After many failed negotiations with company officials, including Pullman himself. A strike was imminent.
On 11 May, twenty-five hundred of the thirty-one hundred workers walked out. Later that day, the company laid off the remaining six hundred. A striker said, “We struck at Pullman because we were without hope.” The workers would find support from the American Railway Union (ARU). Support from the ARU was vital, as its members controlled the flow of trains west of Chicago. The ARU called for a Pullman boycott in June. As a result, no less than 125,000 union members walked off the job in solidarity with the Pullman workers. A turning point came on 22 June at the ARU convention in Chicago when a vote passed calling for a “national boycott of Pullman cars to start on 26 June if no settlement were reached.”
The national boycott began on 26 June. In less than a week, one hundred thousand workers stopped working, completely shutting down twenty railroads. The strike would spread to twenty-seven states, drawing in two hundred fifty thousand workers, freezing most if not all train traffic west of Chicago. Due to the strike, the flow of mail was interrupted, thus the federal government got involved. The Supreme Court would set the stage to the breaking of the strike. The Court imposed an injunction to stop the boycott, citing the regulation of interstate commerce as a purview of the federal government. After the strikers ignored the courts’ injunction, President Cleveland sent in 6,000 federal troops to enforce the Court’s ruling. These federal troops would end up opening fire, killing at least 30 strikers.
The Pullman strike had some important firsts involved with it. The strike would be the first time the Supreme Court used an injunction to stop a strike. The way that Pullman and the government had handled the strike turned public opinion in favor of the strikers and unions. This strike is the labor action that spawned the national holiday of Labor Day. The aftermath of the strike was not kind to George Pullman. When the strike was all said and done, the public, and even his fellow robber barons, turned against Pullman for his handling of the strike. Chicago’s citizenry came to hate Pullman to the extent that his family buried him in an extra-thick vault to keep his remains from being desecrated. The Pullman strike is said to be a monument to how wrong a labor dispute can go. The public as a whole also turned against the President and the democratic party, which was handed its worst electoral result in decades.
Reviewing the strikes covered here, one sees some common threads running through them all. One would be the treatment of the strikers not only by the employers but also by the government apparatus. Secondly, is the continuing issue of wages, or in most cases, lack thereof. Third is an economic recession or depression. Above are just a few instances of the government intervening on the side of the owners. There would have to be an economic catastrophe for the government to intervene by enacting sweeping legislation in favor of workers. The Great Depression would provide such a catastrophe.
The NIRA was the wellspring that would birth many of the future labor-related legislation. The government’s ability to set these codes and their enforcement would be its downfall. NIRA’s end came on 27 May 1935. On this day, the Supreme Court struck down this law as giving the executive branch too much legislative power to regulate intrastate commerce when Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States was decided against the government. The pushing and pulling between the branches of government are just how the system is designed to work. Even though NIRA did not stand up to the Court’s scrutiny, other forthcoming laws would.
The first attempt at a bill started on 24 May 1937 when President Roosevelt sent his first attempt to Congress with a message that all working Americans should get “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.” He continued, “A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling worker’s wages or stretching workers’ hours.” Roosevelt clarified his position by stating that interstate commerce created “conditions that do not meet rudimentary standards of decency should be regarded as contraband and ought not to be allowed to pollute the channels of interstate trade.” This first attempt was sponsored by Alabama Senator Hugo Black and Massachusetts Representative William P. Connery. The basic tenants of the legislation included a minimum wage of $.40 per hour, a minimum age of 16 with exemptions for certain industries outside of mining and manufacturing, and the hard-fought 40-hour workweek. With such a hard-fought battle and a victory in the Senate, where the bill passed 56-28 on 31 July 1937, the bill would be smothered in the House Rules Committee. The fight was just beginning.
Having fractured the Democratic Party with his court-packing fiasco, the President saw an opening to reunite the party in a special congressional session to take on the same issues as the last regular session. On the President’s second go around, some of the opposition said their objections started with the bill itself, calling it “a bad bill badly drawn.” Despite the relentless work of the chair of the House Labor Committee, New Jersey congresswoman Mary Norton, the bill would be sent back to the Labor Committee by a floor vote of 218-198. Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins pointed out that this was a horrible first for the President when she said, “This was the first time that a major administration bill had been defeated on the floor of the House. The press took the view that this was the death knell of wage-hour legislation as well as a decisive blow to the PPresident’s prestige.”
Roosevelt would not stay down. On 3 January 1938, the President used his annual address to Congress to lay out his position. Couching his opinion in a capitalist context by using the purchasing power of the average citizen. Roosevelt’s words paint a picture of how the web of poverty spreads out to touch all aspects of a person’s life. Tying together the reality of millions of workers who, “receive pay so low that they have little buying power. Aside from the undoubted fact that they thereby suffer great human hardship, they are unable to buy adequate food and shelter, to maintain health or to buy their share of manufactured goods.”
The President continued to make his point by stating the obvious upside, especially to a depression-era government, taxes—the connection between an individual’s wage and the government’s ability to function properly. Roosevelt used property values to localize the issue. Low-wage areas hurt the local economy through low property values. For most local and state governments were, and still are, funded by property taxes. There are many other benefits or opportunities that the President believed would be brought about with the implementation of the minimum wage along with his other labor initiatives. Continuing with his address to Congress, Roosevelt noted that there had been aid extended to the nation’s agricultural sector, and he indicated that he believed that similar types of assistance should be set aside for the country’s industrial workers as well. As this portion of his speech wrapped up and moved on to other topics, he drove home his point of view that, in order to stimulate the nation’s economic recovery, the average citizen’s purchasing power must be raised. Congress may be a fickle mistress, so to speak. Hence, the President relied on those in his administration to help him push his agenda. Such as his Labor Secretary Francis Perkins.
As Secretary of Labor, Francis Perkins was an integral part of the realization of The New Deal. Perkins was known for her ability to work with people from across the political spectrum. She was committed to working tirelessly for workers’ safety and well-being, quite possibly as a result of being a witness to the horrors of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Witnessing these horrors, coupled with her social work training, work history, and personality, created a person whose talents matched the needs of a particular time in history as the Secretary of Labor. Perkins would be an intricate part of the negotiations involved with many groundbreaking social programs of the era. The Fair Labor Standards Act established the first federal minimum wage. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), signed by President Roosevelt on 25 June 1938, had taken a year’s worth of wrangling, wheeling and dealing on Capitol Hill. The FLSA set minimum standards regulating child labor, a minimum wage, and capped the work week at 44 hours a week. The 40-hour workweek was not made the standard until 1940. The first minimum wage was $ .25 an hour ($5.55 circa 2024). There had been a years’ worth of back and forth between Capitol Hill and the White House.
The FLSA set the wage, but it also included overtime pay, record keeping, and youth employment standards effecting employees in the private sector and in Federal, State, and local governments. The law’s child labor provisions made certain jobs off-limits, such as meat processing and mining, to list just two. This part of the legislation was designed to get children out of work and into school. For the rest of the population the FLSA also created two categories of Non-exempt and Exempt workers. Exempt workers are workers who receive a salary that’s not tied to the number of hours they work in a week. On the other hand, non-exempt employees are paid 1.5 times their hourly wage for all hours worked over 40 hrs in one week, thereby establishing overtime pay in federal law. The law requires employees to document their time at work. What is considered work, in this context, is set out in the law as well. Covered activities are, in today’s world: Breaks, Tasks done at home or remotely, Work done over lunch, Coming in early or staying late, Phone calls, emails, or texts answered while away from the job site, Training, Travel time if doing work while traveling, picking up items off-site, or transporting items or people for work-related purposes.
There had been other attempts to implement a minimum wage over the years. All of these prior efforts were struck down by the Supreme Court. That is until the case of West Coast Hotel Co. V. Parrish. This 1937 decision stemmed from a Washington State minimum wage law setting a wage for women and minors. Parrish was a hotel housekeeper whose employer refused to pay the state minimum wage of $14.50 per 48-hour workweek ($325.24 in 2025). With a 5-4 decision for Parrish, the Court marked a monumental shift away from striking down legislation that regulated business. This case is one that shows the power of one justice’s vote when one realizes that “While Justice Hughes wrote the opinion, the stark doctrinal shift resulted from Justice Owen Josephus Roberts changing his perspective on this issue. According to Hughes, President Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936 and the impressive achievements of the New Deal caused Roberts to abandon his affiliation with the Court’s conservative justices.”
One person’s change of opinion completely changed the course of modern labor. The Fair Labor Standards Act was the first time in our nation’s history that a piece of federal legislation laid out the concepts within as rights, not privileges. As a society, the act and the rights it has enshrined have become an integral aspect of most American’s working lives. As the United States moves forward down the path of time may we remember the sacrifices of life and limb that were paid by our forerunners. As society continues to struggle to maintain a balance between the interests of both capital and labor, may we not forget the pain of the past so the blood of the future is not worthlessly shed.
Photo above: Political cartoon from the Chicago Labor newspaper from July 7, 1894 about labor at the Pullman Company, 1894, Chicago Labor Newspaper. Courtesy Wikipedia Commons. Below: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt touting New Deal acts on radio broadcast, 1940, Harris and Ewing. Courtesy Library of Congress. Info Source: “National Industrial Recovery Act (1933).” National Archives, 2021; DeSimone, Bailey. “From the Serial Set: The History of the Minimum Wage: In Custodia Legis.”; The Library of Congress, 2020; “Frances Perkins | AFL-CIO.” Aflcio.org; H_Wotan. “History of Wages in the United States from Colonial Times to 1928.” Scribd, 2024; The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Wagner Act | Summary, History, & Facts.” 2018; Morris, Richard B. “Chapter 1: The Emergence of American Labor by Richard B. Morris | U.S. Department of Labor.” 2019; Suranyi, Anna. "Indentured Servitude in Colonial America." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. 2024. Oxford University Press; Blank, Rebecca M., and Claudia Goldin. “Understanding the Gender Gap.” Economica, 1992; “Labor and Labor Movements | Encyclopedia.com; Jacksonville, Florida State College at, and Cynthia Gardner Counsil. “The Rise of Industrial Labor in Antebellum America.” Fscj.pressbooks.pub; Atterberry, Tara. “The Irish in the American Civil War.” Gale Blog: Library & Educator News, 2021; “Immigrants in the Union Army.” Edspace.american.edu; “Notable Labor Strikes of the Gilded Age.” Faculty.weber.edu; “Image 7 of the New York Herald (New York [N.Y.]), 1877.”; The Library of Congress, 2015; Adamczyk, Joseph. “Great Railroad Strike of 1877 | History, Facts, & Significance.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 2018; Piper, Jessica.”The Great Railroad Strike of 1877: A Catalyst for the America Labor Movement”; “The Dramas of Haymarket. A Web Site Review for the Journal for MultiMedia History, Volume 3 (2000).” Www.albany.edu; Schneirov, Richard . “The Haymarket Bomb in Historical Context | Northern Illinois University Digital Library.” Digital.lib.niu.edu; “Jane Addams and the 1894 Pullman Strike.” Social Welfare History Project, 2015; National Constitution Center. “On This Day, the Pullman Strike Changes Labor Law - National Constitution Center.” National Constitution Center, 2019; Tyler, Ray. “Big Trouble in a Company Town: The Pullman Strike.” Teaching American History, 2020; Rosefield, Jayne, Critical Moment-Brunswick Review Issue 13 - Workforce 2017; Payne-Patterson, Jasmine, and Adewale A. Maye. “A History of the Federal Minimum Wage: 85 Years Later, the Minimum Wage Is far from Equitable.” Economic Policy Institute, 2023; “Fair Labor Standards Act Definition | Britannica Money.”; “Britannica Money.” Britannica.com, 2024; “On This Day, Supreme Court Invalidates Key FDR Program - National Constitution Center.” National Constitution Center – Constitutioncenter.org, 2021; “A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. V. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935).” Justia Law; The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Schechter Poultry Corp. V. United States | Law Case.” 2018; Works Cited “Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum - Our Documents.” Marist.edu, 2019; FDR Library. “FDR: From Budget Balancer to Keynesian - FDR Presidential Library & Museum.” Fdrlibrary.org, 2016; hilaryparkinson. “A Factory Fire and Frances Perkins.” Pieces of History, 2011; U.S. Department of Labor. “Wages and the Fair Labor Standards Act.” U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of Labor; Murphy, Margaret. “The Constitutionality of Minimum Wage: The Legal Battles of Elsie Parrish and Frances Perkins for a Fair Day's Pay” Princeton Historical Review 2021-22; Team, Content. “West Coast Hotel Co. V. Parrish - Case Summary and Case Brief.” Legal Dictionary, 2019; Oyez. “West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish.”; Pictures & Tables Minimum Wage Bibliography, U.S. Department of Labor. “Consolidated Minimum Wage Table | U.S. Department of Labor.” 2023.
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President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who served four terms as
President. Courtesy National Archives.
Out of work workers during the Great Depression. Courtesy National Archives.
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During the decade of the 1930's, World's Fairs of various sizes were held throughout the United States to stimulate the local economies as public works projects to pull the country out of depression. They were also used a public confidence projects to buoy the spirit of a nation in economic turmoil.
Chicago 1933-4
San Diego 1935-6
Cleveland 1936-7
Dallas 1936-7
New York 1939-40
San Francisco 1939-40
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Take the time to listen, not only to the guides at the various historic sites you visit, but also to the ambiance around the sites themselves. Imagine yourself back in time. It's easier to do in the early morning or evening when crowds are low and the bustle lessened, but it can be a wonderful experience to imagine for yourself the past that happened on the ground where you stand. Above photo, the salient at Spotsylvania Battlefield, Virginia.
Night view of the Trylon and Perisphere at the New York World's Fair of 1939-40, 1939, New York Daily News, Courtesy Pinterest. During the first year of the fair, World War II would start.
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