There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  So remote was the area where the Mollies allegedly held sway, and so grandiose did the sensationalized claims of their abuses become, that it is difficult even to this day to ascertain their actual history. While the tradition remains that the Molly Maguires were a treacherous gang of labor sympathizers who terrorized the anthracite district for a generation or more, it is likely that Gowen’s conflation of the Mollies with the WBA, his bare-knuckle investigative and prosecutorial tactics, along with hundreds of sensationalized news articles, are more truly responsible for their enduring legend—an early example of capital energizing the courts and the press to paint labor with the broad brush of treason and criminality. Even in the midst of the trials, local Pottsville folk assured a New York Times reporter that it was common knowledge that Gowen had brought the prosecutions “for the purpose of breaking up a labor organization that was hurtful to his business interests”88 and had allowed popular prejudice against the Irish to do the rest.

  The Mollies, in the end, were not above creating legends of their own. Convicted outlaw Tom Fisher placed a handprint on the wall of his jail cell as he awaited execution at Mauch Chunk in March 1878, and predicted it would remain there forever as a sign of his innocence. The hand’s outline was visible as late as the 1930s, it is said, when it was plastered over to discourage the curious.89

  IN 1873 AMERICA TRIPPED OVER its own hurrying feet. With the failure of the banking house of Jay Cooke and Company and the ensuing collapse of other financial firms, the post–Civil War economic boom in stocks, railroads, and new national markets seemed suddenly to have run its course. The panic’s effects rippled out from the East Coast to farms, mines, and retailers across the country, halting construction and slowing manufacturing. Even the thriving steel mills were quieted, prompting one veteran of that enterprise to predict that “within a few years, the furnace-stacks of the industry [will] only be useful as observatories for the study of astronomy.”90

  Labor, which had struggled to find a cogent answer to the swift buildup of industry and the dehumanizing organization of factory work, now faced the challenges of slashed wages and massive layoffs. Unionization itself was jeopardized. As of 1870 there had been thirty-three national unions, but there were only nine by 1877, with overall union membership down from three hundred thousand in 1870 to fifty thousand in 1876. William Sylvis’s NLU, which had once boasted six hundred thousand members, had folded in 1872, three years after the death of its guiding force. The eight-hour cause, cooperatives—each had thrived in turn, but neither had adequately answered the question of whether American workers could shorten the economic distance between themselves and their employers, or could themselves become producers of wealth. The Knights of St. Crispin, a shoemakers’ union organized in 1867, gained prominence and built a membership of fifty thousand, but collapsed within a decade, having dissipated much of its energy opposing new manufacturing technology and the unskilled immigrant labor that operated it. The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, a pan-trades organization started in 1869 that somewhat replicated the broad agenda of the NLU, had by the mid-1870s gathered no more than five thousand members, while the strongest railroad union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, was largely a benevolent society with little taste for confrontation; its craft elitism tended to minimize even the likelihood of collaboration with fellow rail workers.

  Hard times offered little traction to workers but were especially punishing to the indigent. Reconstruction, the federal government’s effort to guide the former Confederate states’ reentry into the Union with new state constitutions, the vote for the freedmen, and equal rights, was increasingly derided as hubristic social and political engineering; federal “occupying” troops and remaining carpetbag governors sympathetic to Reconstruction’s aims were chased from the South by 1877. Out of sheer weariness with war- and race-related issues, and also from impatience with Reconstruction’s perceived excesses, the American public had largely surrendered its postwar idealism; it now evinced scant interest in programs to relieve the plight of the distressed, especially Southern freedmen. At the same time, in response to the influx of immigrants from Germany and other European nations with turbulent political histories, such as France with its recent Paris Commune, authorities became concerned that any unified expression of worker grievances might not be homegrown, but rather a brand of insurrection drummed up in the cafés of Berlin, Paris, or Vienna.

  Such misapprehensions were not the only obstacles to arriving immigrant workers as they struggled to gain a foothold in their adopted land. A trend of thought known as Social Darwinism (unfair to its namesake, the British naturalist Charles Darwin) contended that social inequalities were inevitable, that the well-off deserved their station in life as the poor deserved theirs. In a sense this was the ideology of free labor taken to its cruelest extreme: each person was to be unhindered in their quest for wealth, security, and independence; but when fate or ill fortune intervened they were left to their own devices, their plight no one else’s fault or responsibility. “It is not the purpose or object of the city government to furnish work to the industrious poor,” New York mayor William Havemeyer had reminded a delegation of unemployed men after the Tompkins Square riot of 1874. “That system belongs to other countries, not ours.”91 From his Brooklyn pulpit, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher expanded on the concept:

  We look upon the importation of the communistic and like European notions as abominations. Their notions and theories that the government should be paternal and take care of the welfare of its subjects and provide them with labor, is un-American. It is the form in which oppression has had its most disastrous scope in the world. The American doctrine is that it is the duty of the government merely to protect the people while they are taking care of themselves—nothing more than that. “Hands off,” we say to the government. “See to it that we are protected in our rights and our individuality. No more than that.”92

  But with 5 million unemployed nationwide and their families suffering in hunger and squalor, demonstrations like the one in Tompkins Square had become a distressing feature of life in large cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and New York, a reality no philosophy of self-reliance, however eloquently stated, could erase.

  Soon workers’ frustration found an appropriate and vulnerable target: the railroads. The reach of the nation’s rail network, built on aggressive expansion and fat government land grants, now extended to more than seventy thousand miles of track, a development crowned by the 1869 linking of the two coasts with the driving of the golden spike at Promontory, Utah. The railroads’ growth created new national markets for beef, wheat, and other goods shipped by freight, along with faster and more efficient modes of passenger travel. States such as Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Illinois became busy national crossroads, hubs of a system that served the entire country and was maintained by tens of thousands of workers.93

  The rights of these workers had for the most part failed to expand along with the industry. The “roads” were notorious for delayed payment of salaries or offering only scrip transferable at company stores; there was no sick pay, and in some instances even fines for days or hours of missed work. Workers were frequently made to sign what they called “obnoxious contracts,” pledging to abide by company rules and to not attempt to hold management responsible for injury. The latter was a dreadful stipulation in an occupation so routinely dangerous that “a brakeman with both hands and all his fingers was either remarkably skillful, incredibly lucky or new on the job.” The implementation of safety measures in the coupling of trains alone would have greatly reduced rail yard injuries, but, as the trainmen said, “Condolences come cheaper.”94

  But for once labor held a key potential advantage. Unlike most businesses, railroads were geographically “infinite,” their property stretching across vast miles of open countryside, while their trains ran on strict timetables, connecting and intersecting at hundreds of hubs and junctions. Even the most localized work s
toppage or disruption had the potential to halt freight and passenger service over entire regions. Nor could owners protect railway equipment from those who knew best how it ran; striking workers might commandeer dispatch towers, cripple trackside switches, disable locomotives, or carry out other forms of sabotage.

  A preview of the trouble that might ensue came in March 1874, when the Erie Railway fell behind in paying workers at its machine shops in Susquehanna Depot near Scranton. On March 15, a day upon which the Erie had promised that wages would be paid, the railroad announced that it had suffered recent financial reversals and could not make good until the twenty-fifth. The workers agreed to the ten-day grace period but warned they would cease all work if the extended deadline was not met. On the twenty-fifth came word that the company was still short and that it had been forced to prioritize payment to workers elsewhere in the Erie system, as those wages were in even greater arrears.

  Their patience exhausted, the Susquehanna workers seized the company premises, drove away the managers, and vowed that if they were not paid within twenty-four hours they would begin halting trains. The Erie’s response was to fire the leaders of the threatened strike, an act so infuriating to workers that they attacked a number of locomotives, disabling and detouring them into a roundhouse, leaving one thousand freight cars loaded with coal and petroleum and other goods stranded on adjacent sidings. In some cases the trainmen removed crucial mechanical parts of the engines and held them hostage, stashing them elsewhere in the town.

  “The people and press of this section are in sympathy with the men,” reported the New York Times, “and the opinion among all classes is that the company [has] acted in very bad faith with all the employees.”95 Even Sheriff M. M. Helme sided with the strikers, refusing the Erie’s demands that he chase them off railroad property or seek the help of the state militia. Pennsylvania governor J. F. Hartranft told the railroad only Sheriff Helme could make a formal request for troops, while five leading citizens of Susquehanna signed a telegram to the governor assuring him soldiers were not needed. Governor Hartranft, however, did feel obliged to warn the strike’s leaders:

  As an individual, I may sympathize with your people in their misfortune in not receiving prompt payment of their dues, but, as the Chief Executive of this State, I cannot allow creditors, however meritorious their claims may be, to forcibly seize property of their debtors, and hold it without due process of law. Much less can I allow them to take and hold illegal possession of a great highway, and punish the innocent public, either as passengers or transporters, for the default of a corporation with which they have no concern.96

  Railroad lawyers scrambled for a solution: reports were already coming in of delays and stalled trains elsewhere down the line. As the chaos around the depot showed no sign of abating, Sheriff Helme, under mounting pressure from the Erie, did eventually call in the militia. Two thousand soldiers bearing thirty pieces of artillery arrived at Susquehanna, ordering all persons from railroad property. The angry workers cursed the militiamen, but allowed themselves to be herded off the tracks. The company then extended an olive branch, offering to reinstate all employees except the strike spokesmen, whom they deemed to be agitators. When the workers denounced the offer the railroad played its trump card, threatening that if the strike didn’t end at once it would relocate the Susquehanna rail shops permanently to Elmira, New York. Local businesses, alarmed by the economic catastrophe inherent in such a threat, hurriedly withdrew their support of the strikers, one merchant even handing to the Erie’s representatives a list he had compiled of those who had egged on the strike. Within hours the workers began drifting back to their jobs.

  The Susquehanna standoff held lessons for both labor and management. Rail workers had glimpsed how fully the country’s railroads could be delayed, the public inconvenienced, and corporate revenues hurt by a well-timed and strategically located strike. Railroads took away from the crisis the certainty that such disturbances must be terminated in their earliest phase and that clearing railroad tracks of belligerent people required soldiers with guns.97

  THE UNITED STATES OBSERVED the centennial of its birth in July 1876, with a world’s fair in Philadelphia and patriotic commemorations in virtually every city and town, as citizens recalled the nation’s heroic beginnings and regarded with awe the various social and technological attainments that marked the distance it had come. But it was also a year of division across a land still recovering from civil war and diminished by economic distress. The administration of President Ulysses S. Grant was by now associated with several scandals—the Crédit Mobilier’s overbilling for the construction of a Union Pacific roadbed that had lined the pockets of stockholders and politicians; the Whiskey Ring, centered in St. Louis, in which distillers withheld federal liquor taxes and bought official complicity; and the Belknap scandal, wherein Secretary of War William Belknap and his wife “Puss” were found to have taken payments in exchange for the lucrative appointment of a military post tradership. Even the much-admired Reverend Beecher had been exposed as a charlatan and seducer.

  The presidential election itself in that centennial year would be deeply flawed and bitterly contested; with results in several key states in dispute, it played out with backroom deals as well as promises of federal money for a Southern railway, the restoration of white rule in the South, and the setting aside of equal rights for the freedmen in the interest of national reconciliation. When all the trade-offs were in place, Democrat Samuel Tilden, who had probably won the election, was turned aside, and the Republican governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, thereafter known as “His Fraudulency,” was installed in the White House. The powerful influence of the railroad interests, led by Thomas Scott, a U.S. senator and president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, had a role in producing the final bargain.

  As scandal, compromise, and chicanery tainted the highest and mightiest, the lower classes “brooded on the oppression of labor, the arrogance of capital, the wild inequality of fortune, the misery of tenement life, [and] the fear and hunger and degradation of hard times. Whenever quitting time poured thousands into the streets,” wrote the Nation, “there stood the mob, ready-made.”98

  The railroad operators sensed something volatile brooding along their thinly extended system, and the end of the centennial year brought an unsettling portent—one of the most horrific train wrecks in the country’s history. On the snowy night of December 29, 1876, a Lake Shore Road Pacific Express with hundreds of passengers aboard broke through a trestle bridge just east of Ashtabula, Ohio. The wreckage collapsed into a ravine and caught fire. Those fortunate enough to excise themselves struggled in the pitch darkness and freezing water, listening to the screams of those trapped inside the overturned cars, many of whom burned to death. Survivors related the ghastly story of a woman pleading that her leg be severed with an ax that she might escape the flames. One hundred of the 160 people aboard perished, including a prominent Cleveland minister, a pair of newlyweds from Buffalo, and a female cousin of Rutherford B. Hayes.99

  Three months later the railroads faced a different kind of setback when in March the United States Supreme Court upheld the right of the states to regulate private enterprise used by the public, meaning that the railroads alone would no longer be allowed to set the highly profitable rates they charged for the storage and transport of goods. The case, Munn v. Illinois, was the result of efforts by farmers united in the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry; the farmers sought to reduce price gouging by the railroads that controlled the flow of agricultural products to big-city markets. The high court, in a 7–2 ruling, established the constitutionality of the so-called Granger laws—the right of state governments to restrict commerce on railroads, ferries, bridges, waterways, and other facilities, on the grounds that when one puts “property to a use in which the public has an interest, he, in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use, and must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good.”100 The decision was a blow to t
he autonomy of the railroads and the first step toward the creation of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate national transport.

  Chastened by Munn and contemplating declining revenues due to the court’s ruling, the major railroads agreed to halt their self-destructive rate wars. The heads of the big eastern roads—John W. Garrett of the Baltimore & Ohio, William H. Vanderbilt of the New York Central, Hugh J. Jewett of the Erie, and Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania—held a series of meetings in which they worked out ways to pool their freight schedules and adjust shipping rates for their mutual advantage. They also discussed the need for wage cuts and how any ensuing strikes might be combated. The Susquehanna debacle of 1874 was still a fresh memory, and in 1876 the Boston and Maine had been challenged by a potent walkout of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, a strike crushed only through attrition of the Brotherhood’s funds.

  It was also recalled, however, that Franklin Gowen’s Reading had survived a recent work stoppage because it happened to have a pooling arrangement with other coal carriers; its share of the annual business secured, the railroad was less affected by a short-term strike and could afford to wait out disgruntled workers. The four major roads are believed to have agreed on a similar arrangement—what some critics dubbed “strike insurance.” When one railroad cut workers’ wages and suffered a strike, the other three would cover its lost traffic for the strike’s duration. Once that strike had been broken or resolved, the next railroad could roll back wages, with the same guarantee of support from the others. It was a surefire plan to limit the potential losses from labor disruptions and render rail employees’s striking power nil.101