1874 - Commerce

Commerce

The U.S. economic recession that began last year continues, leaving tens of thousands of city dwellers without means of support. German-born socialists hold a mass meeting of workers in New York's Tompkins Square January 13 to bring public attention to widespread poverty following last year's Wall Street collapse; a small force of mounted police headed by Commissioner Abram Duryée charges the crowd and drives it from the square, capturing its flags; hundreds are injured, some of them severely, and although no one is killed the incident will be remembered as the Tompkins Square "Massacre."

Massachusetts enacts the first effective 10-hour day law for women and children May 8. The Bureau of Labor Statistics created 4 years ago has been largely responsible for passage of the measure (see Supreme Court decision, 1908).

Elements of Pure Economics (Eléments d'économique politique pure) (first volume) by Lausanne economist Léon Walras, now 39, assumes "a regime of perfectly free competition" and applies techniques used for treating systems of simultaneous equations to construct a mathematical model in which productive factors, products, and prices automatically adjust themselves in an economic equilbrium (see Walras, 1865); his final volume will appear in 1874, giving one of the first comprehensive mathematical analyses of general economic equilibrium.

A silver prospector strikes it rich at Oro City (Leadville) in Colorado Territory, where the placer gold found in 1859 has long since been exhausted. Metallurgist A. B. Wood recognizes silver-lead ores in material that gold miners have regarded merely as obstructions to their sluices. Active prospecting will begin in the spring of 1877 at Oro City, 10,152 feet high in the Rocky Mountains, and it will be renamed Leadville in 1878 (see 1879; Tabor, 1878).