The protracted deflationary crisis that had beset American industry since the early 1870s took the economy to rock bottom in the depression of 1893–7. For twenty years before the outbreak of the depression, the nation's manufacturing output had grown primarily as a result of ever greater inputs of labor power, despite remarkable technological improvements in some industries. While output per worker increased at a slower rate than the midcentury decades (1840–70) had exhibited, selling prices declined almost steadily, as did the average rates of return on manufacturing investments. Employers in virtually every industry tried to reduce their production costs by lowering wages. That effort was often challenged by workers, whose powers of resistance were strengthened by familial, gender, ethnic, and community loyalties, and especially by the decisive role of skilled craftsmen in the existing relations of production. The contest so pervaded social life that the ideology of acquisitive individualism, which explained and justified a society regulated by market mechanisms and propelled by the accumulation of capital, was challenged by an ideology of mutualism, rooted in working-class bondings and struggles. Chief Justice Paxson had charged the Homestead strikers with “insurrection and rebellion against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” and painter Theodore Rhodie accused the Pullman Company of depriving him not only of income but also of his “right as an American citizen” to espouse and live by union principles. Contests over pennies on or off existing piece rates had ignited controversies over the nature and purpose of the American republic itself.