I am grateful to Sam Cohn, Carol Conell, Stan Engerman, Ken Fones-Wolf, Bruce Laurie, and George Steinmetz for comments. Research support was provided by the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

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3. Some have addressed this question. See Katznelson, Ira, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York, 1981);Google ScholarDawley, Alan, “Workers, Capital, and the State in the Twentieth Century,” in Perspectives on American Labor History: the Problems of Synthesis, ed. Moody, J. Carroll and Kessler-Harris, Alice (DeKalb, 1989), 152–202Google Scholar; and Tomlins, Christopher, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (Cambridge, 1985).Google Scholar

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5. Clews, Henry, “The Labor Crisis,’ North American Review 142 (06 1886):599.Google Scholar

6. Washington D.C.National Republican, 07 21, 1877.Google Scholar

7. Chicago Times, 05 1, 1886.Google Scholar

8. Quoted in Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State (Cambridge, 1982), 87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Pittsburgh Evening Chronicle, July 23, 1877.

10. King, Rufus, “The Labor Crisis,” North American Review 142 (06 1886):606.Google Scholar

11. Quoted in Cooper, Jerry, “The Wisconsin National Guard in the Milwaukee Riots of 1886,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 55 (Autumn 1971):34.Google Scholar

12. Quoted in Kuritz, Hyman, “The Pennsylvania State Government and Labor Controls from 1856 to 1922” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1953), 106.Google Scholar

13. John Swinton's Paper, May 16, 1886.

14. Ibid., November 18, 1883.

15. Phillips, Wendell, The Labor Question (Boston, 1884), 3;Google ScholarChicago Civic Federation, Industrial Conciliation, 1894 (Chicago, 1895), 63.Google Scholar

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17. National Civic Federation, Industrial Conciliation, 1901 (New York, 1902), 14–15.Google Scholar

18. Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration (Boston, 1881), 37, 171.Google Scholar

19. Groat, George, “Industrial Arbitration in New York State,” Yale Review (02 1907):413Google Scholar; New York State Workingmen's Trade Assembly, Proceedings of the Convention, 1887 (New York, 1887), 3–5.Google Scholar

20. John Swinton's Paper, March 29, 1885.

21. A shift of only 700 New York votes would have elected Blaine over Cleveland in 1884.

22. Hatch, Leonard, “Government Industrial Arbitration,” Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor 60 (09 1905):570, 579.Google Scholar

23. Herald, Boston, 05 23, 1886; Boston Evening Transcript, May 24, 1886; New YorkHerald, 04 14, 1886.Google Scholar

24. I constructed a composite index of prolabor voting in the state assembly using two votes on establishing the board and requiring that one member be from a labor union. I gave legislators a point for each “prolabor” vote and a negative point for each “antilabor” vote. The prolabor index thus ranges from – 2 for the most antilabor legislators to + 2 for the most prolabor. The legislature was closely balanced and the average score was only + 0.05.

As independent variables, the regressions include legislator's characteristics, party, and occupation; structural characteristics of the district, including the industrial distribution of the labor force, the wage earners' share of the electorate, and the proportion foreign-born and urban; and measures of mobilized worker pressure, including strike rates and support for the Greenbacks in the last presidential election. The regressions are available from the author upon request.

25. While some supported labor's position on arbitration legislation owing to fear of a politically mobilized constituency, few legislators appeased passive constituents. Structural characteristics of the electorate, including the proportion who were proletarians and the industrial distribution of the labor force, had little or no impact on legislative voting.

26. New York Times, April 4, 1886.

27. The New York board intervened in 7 percent of strikes in 1887–1904, contributing to a settlement in 2 percent; Hatch. “Government Industrial Arbitration,” 620, 628.

28. Massachusetts, , Board of Arbitration, Report, 1893 (Boston, 1893), 10–11Google Scholar; Report, 1890 (Boston, 1890), 7–8.Google Scholar

29. Illinois, , State Board of Arbitration, Fifth Annual Report, 1900 (Springfield, 1900), 7.Google Scholar

30. Mote, Carl, Industrial Arbitration (Indianapolis, 1916), 223.Google Scholar

31. The striker rate is calculated as strikers and workers locked out divided by the labor force in trade, transportation, manufacturing, mining, and construction, using data on labor disputes by state in the 1887, 1895, 1900, and 1906 reports of the United States Commissioner of Labor, and data on the labor force in United States, Census of Occupations.

The New York striker rate increased relatively slowly, falling from 183 percent of the national average in 1881–86 to only 168 percent of the national average in 1901–5. In Massachusetts, however, the striker rate rose sharply from half the national average before the system of state arbitration was established to 98 percent of the national average in 1901–5.

32. While the share of union members covered by collective bargaining agreements increased in the late 1890s, it peaked at only 21 percent in 1901 before declining to 14 percent in 1911. This is from a comparison of the collective bargaining data in Barnett, George, “National and District Systems of Collective Bargaining in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 26 (1911–1912):425–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with union membership data in Wolman, Leo, The Growth of American Trade Unions, 1880–1923 (New York, 1924).Google Scholar

33. Between 1881 and 1905, fewer than 15 percent of strikes ended with compromise settlements. In 1901–5, fewer than 8 percent were settled with joint agreement or arbitration. See United States Commissioner of Labor, Report, 1906 (Washington D.C., 1906), 36–37, 425–71.Google Scholar

34. National Civic Federation, Conference on Industrial Conciliation, 1902 (New York, 1903), 167.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., 235, 81; see also Gilman, Nicholas, Methods of Industrial Peace (Boston, 1904), 344.Google Scholar

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37. Storm, George, a New York employer, in Senate, U.S., Relations Between Labor and Capital (Washington, 1885), 992;Google ScholarIron Age, 08 2, 1888.Google Scholar

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39. In practice, of course, many mediators did more than just pass offers from one party to the other; their involvement may have encouraged some additional compromises, including concessions from employers that employees would not have won on their own. In Massachusetts, however, this effect was probably very small since the strike failure rate rose after the institution of state mediation in 1886 even while declining elsewhere. In New York, by contrast, state strike mediation benefited labor. In 1913–14, for example, New York strikers won at least some of their demands in 62.1 percent of strikes with state mediation compared with 53.2 percent of other strikes, a difference of 17 percent. Even this is much smaller than the impact of state mediation in France; see Friedman, Gerald, “Strike Success and Union Ideology, the United States and France, 1880–1914,” Journal of Economic History (03 1988): 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. Parsons, Frank, “Compulsory Arbitration,” Arena 17 (03 1897):663.Google Scholar See also Lloyd, Henry Demarest, A Country Without Strikes (New York, 1902).Google Scholar

41. Boston Labor Leader, March 5, 1887, and November 26, 1887. The New York State Workingmen's Assembly endorsed compulsory arbitration in 1888, dropping the demand only in 1897; see Groat, “Industrial Arbitration,” 415–16. Even after Gompers and other national leaders came to reject compulsory arbitration, many unionists continued to support it; see United States Congress, House of Representatives, National Arbitration Bill: Hearings of the Subcommittee of the Committee on Labor, 03 16, 30, 04 6, 18, 1904 (Washington, 1904), 10–12.Google Scholar

42. In Burnham's, Walter D. words, they converted America from “a fairly democratic regime into a rather broadly based oligarchy.” See his “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review 59 (03 1965):23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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45. The cases include Plessy v. Ferguson (1895), Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Co. (1895–96), In re. Debs (1895), and United States v. E. C. Knight (1895).

46. Erie, Steven P., Rainbow's End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985 (Berkeley, 1988), 250.Google Scholar

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50. See, for example, regarding disfranchisement in New Jersey, Reynolds, John F., Testing Democracy: Electoral Behavior and Progressive Reform in New Jersey, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1988), 137–67.Google Scholar

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52. Burnham, “The Changing Shape,” 10.

53. Reynolds, Testing Democracy, 150.

54. This is based on a regression of GLP voting in Massachusetts towns in 1884 and the legislative voting regressions described in note 24 above. The regressions are available upon request.

55. Boston, Labor Leader, 11 26, 1887.Google Scholar

56. President Dallas of the New York State Workingmen's Federation, AFL, in Proceedings of the Convention … 1905 (Ithaca, 1905), 12.Google Scholar

57. Boot and Shoe, 01 15, 1900.Google Scholar