Daily Inspiration Quote by Ray Stannard Baker

Baker’s sentence reads like a quiet rebuke to the era’s favorite storyline: that labor unrest is naturally chaotic, irrational, and violent. The hook is the phrase “everyone predicted.” He’s not just reporting skepticism; he’s exposing it as a social reflex, a default suspicion aimed at “divergent people” who aren’t supposed to cohere. “Divergent” does double duty: it concedes real differences (ethnicities, languages, trades, skill levels) while hinting at how employers and civic leaders used those differences as a wedge, betting fragmentation would do the work of strikebreaking.

Then Baker pivots to the unglamorous metric that actually matters: not many “went back to the mills.” The word “comparatively” is classic journalistic hedging, but also a signal of credibility; he’s careful not to romanticize. He makes one carve-out for “skilled men” and “craft unions,” a nod to the internal class system of labor itself. Skilled workers often had more to lose, more to negotiate, and more institutional pathways than the mass of unskilled laborers. Baker is pointing at solidarity as an achievement, not a given.

The closing clause - “conducted with little violence” - is the real subtextual punch. It anticipates the public’s appetite for riot narratives and refuses to feed it. In the Progressive Era context, where strikes were routinely framed as threats to civic order, Baker’s restraint becomes an argument: collective action can be disciplined, strategic, and broadly supported, even when the workforce is supposedly too divided to act as one.