Prosperity had mitigated the grievances of both classes,
but while the farmer still had a great deal to expect from politics in
the form of state regulation of railway rates, the wage earners'
struggle now turned entirely economic and not political.
In California, as in the Eastern industrial States, the railway strikes
of 1877 precipitated a political movement. California had retained gold
as currency throughout the entire period of paper money, and the labor
movement at no time had accepted the greenback platform. The political
issue after 1877 was racial, not financial, and the weapon was not
merely the ballot, but also "direct action"--violence. The anti-Chinese
agitation in California, culminating as it did in the Exclusion Law
passed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most important single
factor in the history of American labor, for without it the entire
country might have been overrun by Mongolian labor and the labor
movement might have become a conflict of races instead of one of
classes.[10]
The seventies witnessed another of those recurring attempts of
consumers' cooperation already noticed in the forties and sixties.
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