During a severe period of national economic recession in the early 1890s, labor unrest was at its height. A volatile situation in Chicago in August 1893 caused the city's then mayor, Carter Henry Harrison, to warn that the preponderance of the unemployed would lead to riots that would "shake the country", unless Congress interceded. In late August 1893, Gompers addressed 25,000 unemployed workers who had massed on the shore of Lake Michigan. As reported in the "Chicago Tribune" on August 31, Gompers inveighed against the controllers of capital and the titans of industry and finance. "Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it on riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?" Workers were also consumers, he asserted, and cuts to their wages would hurt not only their personal well-being but the economy as a whole. "When workers wages are reduced they necessarily use less, consume less, because of their reduced purchasing power", he wrote. "Only those who ignorantly or grabbingly believe in their avarice that business can prosper with wage reductions have yet to learn the lesson of industrial life and progress."