by James Green
When the Great Upheaval reached its climax on May 1, 1886, Chicago was its epicenter. At least 40,000 workers struck there, but after a while it was impossible to keep count. Perhaps as many as 60,000 laborers left their jobs. Unlike the strikes in other cities, where a few trades took the lead, the upheaval in Chicago reverberated through scores of shops and factories, construction sites and packinghouses; it emptied the huge lumberyards of workers, clogged the harbor with lake vessels and stranded trains in the huge railyards of the nation’s transportation hub. The general strike even sucked in thousands of immigrant factory operatives and common laborers: nowhere was the unskilled proletariat mobilized the way it was in Chicago.
There were many reasons why the eight-hour strikes in Chicago were the largest, most aggressive and most successful in the nation; one important reason was that the anarchists had become so involved in organizing the unskilled, raising the stakes of the struggle and directing the flow of worker protest toward the general strike on May 1, or what they called “Emancipation Day.”3
NO ONE DREAMED that such a massive strike movement was possible in the fall of 1885, when Chicago unionists were still reeling from the police assault that had broken the streetcar strike in July. Indeed, when George Schilling and a few other activists organized a new Eight-Hour Association, union members in the mainstream Trades and Labor Assembly paid no attention; they were still preoccupied with halting the use of laborsaving machines and ending the use of contract laborers, convict laborers and child laborers—all of whom displaced skilled journeymen. These union members seemed to have forgotten that two years earlier their national Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions had endorsed a bold call for the inauguration of the eight-hour system on May 1, 1886. Trade union delegates had adopted this resolution when they met at Chicago’s Henry George Hall in 1884, but, as Schilling recalled, the conventioneers “returned home, after passing this resolution, and went to sleep.”4
When fall 1885 turned to winter 1886 and the depression strengthened its hold on the city, trade unionists began to respond to Schilling’s wake-up call. The patient efforts of the Eight-Hour Association now attracted a following among craftsmen who found themselves thrown out of work by the twin evils of overproduction and underconsumption, or else replaced by machines or by young women, farm boys and “botch men” willing to work by the piece. The eight-hour activists’ arguments made sense to these proud but beleaguered craftsmen, who were persuaded that, if employers reduced hours, workers would demand higher wages to compensate for lost time; and, with more free time, they would also want more of the good things in life that the leisure classes enjoyed. As they attained a higher standard of living, workers would become a new mass of consumers whose purchases would alleviate overproduction—the curse of the American industrial system and the cause of depressions.5
The eight-hour reform also appealed to some leading citizens, including Mayor Harrison, who regarded it as a way to reduce unemployment and assuage discontented workers; it even elicited favorable remarks from some newspaper editors, like the Tribune’s Joe Medill.6 The anarchists dismissed the revived eight-hour demand as a mere reform until early 1886, when Albert Parsons convinced Spies, Schwab and Neebe that the Internationals needed to join the new movement that was generating so much enthusiasm among the skilled and unskilled alike.7
Once again the anarchists found themselves working with former socialist comrades and fellow trade unionists. Serious differences remained, however. The leaders of the Eight-Hour Association hoped that employers would voluntarily accept the eight-hour system as a legitimate reform with mutual gains for labor and capital alike. The Internationals, on the other hand, predicted massive employer opposition and argued that success would only come as a result of an aggressive general strike on May 1.
During the next few months the excitement and anticipation of a showdown brought hundreds of fresh recruits into the Knights of Labor. They joined newly formed local assemblies, and like similar bodies across the nation, they resolved to take joint action on May 1, 1886. In doing so, these Knights defied the orders of Grand Master Workman Terence Powderly, who opposed a general strike because he feared it would generate destructive class conflict. He also complained about the “quality” of the new members rushing to join the Knights and even suspended organizing for forty days, but to no avail: his defiant organizers kept on recruiting.8
Propelled by the eight-hour movement’s momentum, the Knights even penetrated two fortresses of antiunionism, the McCormick Reaper Works and the Pullman car shops. After conceding defeat in his battle with union molders the previous year, Cyrus McCormick, Jr., had regained the offensive, determined to win his war against the union.9 In the summer his manager fired top union leaders, and in January 1886 the company terminated nearly all the skilled molders in the works, including the union members who had protested the wage cut the previous March. These skilled men were all replaced by common laborers who operated pneumatic molding machines. Moreover, when McCormick demanded police protection, he now received assurances from city officials that the department would take strong action to protect strikebreakers in any future labor dispute. Chief Inspector Bonfield assumed personal command of the area around the reaper works, replacing the popular Irish captain who had restrained his patrolmen during the last strike at the plant.
Despite all this, McCormick found his control of the works hotly contested by die-hard unionists, who organized a militant new District Assembly of the Knights on the Southwest Side. By February 1886 the union activists had organized nearly everyone in the harvester plant, strikebreakers and all, into two new divisions. The skilled machinists, blacksmiths and pattern makers were grouped together in the United Metal Workers, a militant union allied with the anarchist-led Central Labor Union, and McCormick’s army of common laborers and machine operators were enrolled in the new Knights of Labor District Assembly.
On February 12, 1886, a joint committee of unions presented a list of demands that called for advanced wages in all departments, for an extension to the brief time allowed for toilet use, for the discharge of all scabs, for preferential hiring of old hands displaced by molding machines and for a pledge from management not to terminate any workers for union activity. McCormick accepted some of these proposals but refused the union’s demand that he remove five nonunion men from the plant. In response, a mass meeting of all unions voted to strike in protest. Before the workers could act, however, McCormick declared a lockout and shut the factory down. The stage was set for the final showdown at the reaper works on the Black Road.
After organizing the common laborers at McCormick’s in February, Knights from District Assembly 57 ranged throughout Cook County as far south as Kensington, the wide-open town where George Pullman’s workers went to drink their beers and speak their minds. In April the agitators George Schilling and Albert Parsons addressed a packed meeting in the town’s Turner hall and afterward recruited 400 of Pullman’s skilled car builders for the Knights of Labor. The radical advance men of the Chicago movement had arrived at the gates of the model factory town.10
WITHIN A WEEK, the upsurge in organizing at the McCormick works and Pullman town became episodes in a much larger national manifestation of worker unrest, one triggered by a second titanic confrontation between the Knights of Labor and the managers of Jay Gould’s immense southwestern railroad system.
The Knights of Labor had achieved a spectacular victory against Gould’s railroads the previous July, but soon afterward they saw their members suffer from arbitrary wage cuts, layoffs, transfers and other abuses. When one Knight in Texas was summarily fired for attending a union meeting, he protested that he had been given permission, but to no avail. The company refused to take him back. In response, the order decided to act on its motto: “An injury to one is the concern of all.” On March 6, 1886, the Knights announced the ultimate solidarity strike, calling out all the men on the Texas & Pacific line as a protest against arbitrary treatment of
one union railway man. They demanded that management meet with union committees and arbitrate disputes, instead of relying on unilateral action.11 Railroad company managers often dealt with individual craft unions of engineers, firemen and switchmen, but the Knights seemed far more menacing because they stood for all grades of workers and because they believed in cooperative enterprise.
The 1886 strike on the Gould system assumed an epic significance because it raised an essential question about American freedom: When a wage earner freely contracted with an employer, did the employee agree to sacrifice his liberty in return for compensation? The railroad owners believed so and stood firmly on the principle that “the right to hire men for what labor is offered in the market must be upheld against brute force,” if necessary.12 The Knights of Labor rejected this principle, insisting that men with empty stomachs made no free contracts, and that workers who sold their labor in order to live usually assented or submitted, but rarely consented, to the terms of an employment contract. Without a union, the Knights argued, the railroad worker found himself in a kind of indenture, a form of “involuntary servitude” prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment.13
The Strike, a graphic reproduction of a painting by Robert Kohler depicting the scene at a factory during the Great Upheaval
The Knights not only posed fundamental questions about freedom; they raised the specter of two new kinds of concerted action by workers: the boycott and the sympathy strike. The unionists had been extremely effective in organizing boycotts to support fellow workers on strike in various cities, notably in Chicago, but they had never engaged in a sympathetic strike like the one the Knights called against Gould’s railroads in 1886, initiating a trend that disturbed employers for years to come. During the first five years of the 1880s, only 33 sympathy strikes occurred; after 1886 came a five-year period when workers struck in support of fellow workers 397 times. 14
Terence Powderly and other leading Knights warned their southwestern members not to take the risky job action against the nation’s most powerful capitalist, but to no end. The walkout kept spreading along the rail lines of the 10,000-mile southwestern system, so that in a few days 14,000 railroad men had quit work. The strike soon became the most violent conflict the nation had suffered since the 1877 uprising, as strikers halted engines, intimidated strikebreakers and battled armed posses of railroad gunmen along the routes. In some places the conflict seemed like a “social war” as rank-and-file Knights of Labor demonstrated an extreme bitterness toward their employers.15
No strike seemed more like a “species of civil war” than the confrontation at the McCormick works in Chicago. After locking out striking molders, plant managers trolled the Midwest for replacement workers and issued revolvers to 82 loyal employees who were ready to work when the plant resumed operations; they also set up kitchens to serve food to a formidable detachment of 400 police sent to protect strikebreakers. When McCormick reopened with a nonunion workforce, Chief Inspector Bonfield commanded an all-out assault on the combined union picket lines and opened a cordon sanitaire for the strikebreakers.16
The locked-out workers immediately called a mass meeting near the plant, which was addressed by leading Knights as well as by Albert Parsons of the Alarm and Michael Schwab of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, who spoke in German. Despite the garrisoning of the works by Bonfield’s men and Pinkerton’s agents, the battle at McCormick’s raged into April as strikers and their neighbors “waylaid the scabs on their way to the plant,” in the words of one reporter, who added that police were kept jumping from one point to another in a vain attempt to protect the nonunion men. 17
As the area around the big reaper works began to resemble a war zone, it became clear that the tension building between rival forces could no longer be relieved—not by McCormick, who vowed to destroy the union; not by the strikers, who refused to sacrifice their manhood by returning to work on McCormick’s terms; not by the anarchists, who were preparing for street warfare; not by the mayor, who no longer controlled the police department; and certainly not by Inspector Bonfield, who intended to crush the workers’ resistance.
Then, in the midst of this tense standoff, news arrived from downstate that heightened the strikers’ worst fears of what might happen in Chicago. On April 9 the great southwest strike against the Gould rail system leapt across the Mississippi River into Illinois at East St. Louis, a bustling railroad town less than half a day away from Chicago by fast train. The Knights, led by determined switchmen, had disabled trains at this important western terminus of several major rail lines. That day, a sheriff’s posse composed of railway employees opened fire with Winchester rifles on a picket line after one striker defied a warning and set foot on company property. The deputies, largely recruited from loyal Gould employees, killed seven strikers and wounded many more. Railway workers and their supporters, enraged by the massacre of unarmed men, reacted by burning railroad shops and destroying property in the yards. The news of the killings so alarmed Governor Oglesby that he placed the city under martial law and ordered seventeen companies of National Guard troops to East St. Louis. Reports of the massacre infuriated the anarchists in Chicago and became the cause célèbre of nightly protest meetings.18
It did not take long for the Great Upheaval to rumble into Chicago. The next day, April 10, 1,300 union switchmen paralyzed train traffic in the city’s numerous railyards when they left work to demand that their brothers be hired instead of nonunion men. For a few days the specter of 1877 again hung over the city, until Philip Armour and other packinghouse owners persuaded the railway company executives to accede to the strikers’ demands rather than cause another “railroad war.”19
THE EXCITEMENT GENERATED by the Knights’ revival at the McCormick works and by the railroad workers’ challenge to the mighty Jay Gould reverberated through all of Chicago’s factories and shops. New Knights of Labor trade assemblies popped up all over the city as 10,000 workers poured into the resurgent order. The Knights also organized more mixed assemblies to accept common laborers and other immigrants, some of whom said they wanted to enlist in the grand army of labor so that they too could turn out on strike. New recruits included young women who toiled as domestic servants and the “sewing girls” in the city’s huge clothing industry.20
After one garment-shop owner locked out his female employees, the union women formed “Our Girls Cooperative Clothing Manufacturing Company.” Its objective was “to elevate the intellectual, social, and financial condition of its members, and the manufacturing of all classes of clothing, and the sewing of any cloth goods in use in wholesale or retail trade.” Capitalized at $10,000, the cooperative was owned entirely by union members who bought shares of stock for $10 each. Net profits were divided equally among stockholders, workers and the cooperative fund of the order’s General Assembly. Forty women were steadily employed in the worker-run shop, where they labored for only eight hours a day; it was one of twenty such cooperative initiatives launched by the Chicago Knights.21
The urge to organize and mobilize even seeped into the worst sweatshops on the West Side, filled with the city’s newest immigrants—Jews who had fled the horrendous pogroms in Russia a few years before. Abraham Bisno, a young cloak maker, remembered that these newcomers spoke no German or English and knew nothing about boycotts or the eight-hour strikes reported on so extensively in newspapers that reached other immigrants. Still, the eight-hour fever was so contagious it crossed into this isolated Jewish settlement. At one meeting August Spies addressed the cloak makers with the help of a Yiddish translator, and at another an American Knight struggled to explain the eight-hour cause in English. “There was great tumult,” Bisno recalled, “everybody was talking and nobody quite knew what this thing was about.” But even a Yiddish speaker like Bisno grasped the core message. “All I knew then of the principles of the Knights of Labor was that the motto . . . was ‘One for All, and All for One.’ ”22
Whether their pay was high or low, Chicago workers flocked to the e
ight-hour cause because it constituted a freedom movement. Eight-hour visionaries looked forward to a new day when wage earners no longer lived just to work, and simultaneously looked backward to a time when people toiled together under the sky and close to the earth, passing the time of day without clocks and factory whistles, without machines or foremen to govern their pace. 23 The Knights opened and closed their meetings and rallies with songs that evoked this desire for freedom from the long arm of the job. Their anthem was the “Eight-Hour Song.”
We want to feel the sunshine;
We want to smell the flowers;
We’re sure God has willed it.
And we mean to have eight hours.
We’re summoning our forces from
Shipyard, shop and mill;
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest,
Eight hours for what we will.24
Chicago’s workers, who were mostly newcomers from other places, usually small towns and rural districts, missed feeling the sun on their faces and smelling the flowers in warm months, for they lived and worked in a “city of smoke” where, as one traveler noted, “not even a ghost of the sun” shined.25 Still, some found themselves tantalizingly close to nature at times. Those who toiled at the reaper works and in the lumberyards could see the prairie grasses fading into the western horizon, and, on some days they could even smell the crops when a dry prairie wind blew in from the northwest. On most days, however, a sickening odor drifted out of the stockyards and blanketed the immigrant neighborhoods of Pilsen and the West Side.26 In a city where industry slaughtered millions of animals, blotted out the sky with smoke, poisoned the river with blood and guts and ground up fingers of factory hands like sausage stuffing, workers yearned to save part of themselves and to reclaim part of their day from the chaos of Chicago industry and from what Kipling called its “grotesque ferocity.”27