Throughout the Western capitalist world the late nineteenth century was the age of the labor question. Industrial wage work and the conditions of proletarian life had come to represent distinct social problems – objects of scientific investigation, social reform, and political debate. In the United States, as in England and on the Continent, the labor question reflected the upheavals of the industrial revolution and the rise of working-class activism. Both labor protest and the study of laboring life had burgeoned earlier with industrial transformation; but in the late nineteenth century the scale of concern was as new as the scale of mass insurgency that was evident in proliferating strikes, expanding labor associations, and mounting political agitation often influenced by socialism. Everywhere, the labor question encompassed issues ranging from wages, work relations, factory laws, and the legality of collective action to metropolitan poverty, plebeian home life, housing, and crime; and everywhere, the participants in the debate included a broad range of labor advocates, state officials, moralists, jurists, and social scientists.

The American labor question was profoundly marked by the problem of slavery and emancipation. Only in the United States did fullscale industrial capitalism develop simultaneously with, and literally alongside, the consolidation and overthrow of chattel slavery. And when Americans turned to the labor question in the wake of abolition, they claimed that it followed inevitably from the slavery question. Labor spokesmen argued that now was the time for the country to be “interrogated” by the needs of Yankee hirelings.