Barry Werth:

Beecher exalted workingmen; it was the unions and communists that he despised. Flush from his triumphal return to the national stage, he withstood the predictable scorn of the strikers and their sympathizers, who thought his widely reprinted “bread and water” sermon sanctimonious and hypocritical — profoundly unchristian. More lacerating were the barbs of established opinion. “Suicidal and the part of a lunatic,” the New York World called the sermon. By the next Sunday, July 29, thirty plainclothesmen mingled with the packed congregation at Plymouth Church as Beecher sought to explain himself amid threats and condemnation. His call to let nature take its course in eliminating the unfit through the merciless discipline of the depression had become Beeacher’s next great theme, which he hoped would put the Tilton scandal finally to rest. Once again he consoled his followers that the present economic order, brutal as it was, was God’s will and His way. The poor, he said, must “reap the misfortunes of inferiority.”

“Is the great working class oppressed?” Beecher asked. “Yes, undoubtedly it is… . God had intended the great to be great and the little to be little… . The trade union, originated under the European situation, destroys liberty… . I do not say that a dollar a day is enough to support a working man. But it is enough to support a man.”

– Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America