John D. Rockefeller Quotes
We are coming to see that there should be no stifling of labor by capital, or of capital by labor; and also that there should be no stifling of labor by labor, or of capital by capital.
At the time, the NYC subway was operated by a private companies. Quill worked for the largest, the Interboro Rapid Transit Company. Quill organized the workers and forced major changes in the system.
The factory workers in Lynn, Massachusetts started their own newspaper: This was published four years before Marx and Engles published the Communist Manifesto
See {616053}. The strike was broken by jailing one of the main leaders.
At the time, it did seem impossible that labor and capital would ever have harmonious relations. But the notion that slavery would solve the problem is as preposterous as anything ever entered into the American political dialogue. But there were many in the South, and some in the North, who actually believed it. Even 150 years later, while labor and capital relations were much better than pre Civil War, they still could not be described as “harmonious” or “friendly”.
During Southern slavery, the poor white of the South had almost no prospects. He was always competing against slave labor which held his wages very low. At first he could he could get by if he had a trade—a carpenter, a blacksmith, a teamster, etc. However, soon slave owners invested in training some of their slaves, so even a white Southern tradesman could not earn a high wage as a Northern tradesman did. Unfortunately, the Southern upper class persuaded the poor whites that if slaves were emancipated they would be greater competition than they were under slavery, and there never was the common interest with the Northern labor that Emerson hypothesized.
America’s first political economist
John Davison Rockefeller Sr. was an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is widely considered the wealthiest American of all time and the richest person in modern history.
