There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  This self-serving strategy allowed the firms to conveniently avoid dealing with the very real grievances simmering among rail workers—exhausting work schedules, the lack of overtime pay, an unacceptable frequency of on-the-job injuries, and a seniority system that was exploited to underpay new hires. By choosing the subterfuge of “strike insurance,” the corporations neglected the opportunity to address the simple fact that workingmen were being pushed by the rail system to work longer for less pay in a dangerous occupation that in every way treated them as replaceable cogs. “Drive a rat into a corner and he will fight,” warned the Irish World at the end of June 1877. “Drive your serfs to desperation … and in their desperation they will some day pounce upon you and destroy you.”102

  THE LONG-ANTICIPATED CONFRONTATION began two weeks later, on July 16, at Martinsburg, West Virginia. That day the Baltimore & Ohio had announced a 10 percent wage cut, the second since fall 1876. Firemen were to be lowered from $1.75 to $1.58 per day, brakemen from $1.50 to $1.35. The company also said it planned to reduce the number of days available for work. For several hours unhappy trainmen milled about the Martinsburg yards discussing the cuts; then the crew of a cattle train abruptly stopped work, leaving their live cargo stranded. When management sought other workers to replace the crew, the crowd of employees announced that the yard was to be frozen. To emphasize the point, B & O brakeman Richard Zepp led his fellow workers in uncoupling trains so they could not be moved. Mayor A. T. Shutt arrived on the scene and ordered three men taken into custody, but the arresting police were themselves quickly surrounded and made to free the prisoners. Railroad officials in Wheeling, the state capital, learning by telegraph of what had occurred, implored West Virginia governor Henry M. Matthews to order the Beverly Light Guards, a local Martinsburg militia, to secure the B & O yards at once.

  The militia, under the command of Colonel C. J. Faulkner, entered the yards early the next morning and attempted to move the cattle train that was still standing in the station from the previous day, but no engineer would cooperate. Soldiers then took charge of the locomotive. When the cars began to move a striking fireman named William Vandergriff threw a track switch, diverting the train. Private John Poisal of the Berkeley Guards confronted Vandergriff, rifle in hand, at which Vandergriff drew a pistol and fired, grazing the soldier, who immediately returned fire, as did other militiamen, mortally wounding Vandergriff. Other strikers then shot Poisal, bloodying his right hand. Most of the militiamen were locals who were halfhearted about policing the strikers in the first place, and the exchange of gunfire and the wounding of two men seemed to permanently sour them on the mission. Many walked away, ending the militia’s brief effort to break the strike, while the cattle were off-loaded and driven to graze in a nearby pasture.

  Frustrated by the militia’s abandonment of its duty, the B & O demanded that Governor Matthews request federal troops, the rail bosses assuring President Hayes in a separate telegram that “this great national highway can only be restored for public use by the interposition of U.S. forces.”103 Hayes, installed recently as president on a Republican promise to formally end Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops from the South, stood at an historical crossroads.104 Although the fourth article of the Constitution, which promises each state a republican form of government, required the president to send troops at the request of a state’s governor to quell domestic violence, not since the time of President Jackson had the president dispatched federal soldiers during peacetime to settle a labor dispute.105 Hayes’s immediate predecessor, President Grant, had had numerous opportunities to weigh the requests of Republican governors in Southern states for emergency military aid; often Grant had complied; more recently he had refused; but the resounding sentiment that accompanied the end of Reconstruction, as Hayes confided to his diary, was that the time had come to “put aside the bayonet,” in effect to cease the practice of using federal troops to intervene in local affairs. Still, what was happening to the B & O was no longer local politics or civil rights but business. With governors and leading railroad men beseeching Washington’s help, citing the complete disruption of America’s railways and the inability or unwillingness of local militia to put down the rebellion, Hayes concluded he had no option but to direct three hundred troops to Martinsburg.106

  The soldiers, led by Major General W. H. French, were apparently under orders to avoid bloodshed; one observer said it looked as though they hoped to intimidate people simply by allowing sunlight to gleam off their bayonets.107 With help from those militiamen who had remained loyal, the federal troops were able to make it possible for trains to pass through the town, although they were unable to convince B & O employees to move stranded trains.

  Those trains that did pass through were not having an easy time. In sympathy with Martinsburg, other workers in the vicinity—ironworkers, canal men, miners—had begun a campaign of harassment, hurling stones at trains, blocking the tracks, and occasionally skirmishing with crews. These trackside ambushes were impossible for even the army to detect or defend against, as they could come from the cover of woods or bushes, at blind curves, or from beneath rail bridges. The entire countryside, it appeared, was in rebellion against the railroad.

  Hoping to head off further outbreaks, B & O brass on July 20 asked Governor John Lee Carroll of Maryland to provide armed assistance at Cumberland, a key rail junction in western Maryland, about forty miles from Martinsburg, where a strike was imminent. Carroll wanted to avoid the mistake of Martinsburg—sending local militiamen who would prove timid and useless against their own neighbors—so he ordered two regiments of the Maryland National Guard to entrain at Baltimore. The march of the Guard’s Fifth Regiment from its armory to Baltimore’s Camden Station coincided with quitting time at local factories. At first the workers gathering along city streets instinctively cheered the passing soldiers; when word spread of their mission, however, the crowd’s temper changed. Ugly words and curses fell on the uniformed men, a hail of stones and brickbats followed, and in a moment the proud, orderly procession had become a rout, as the Guardsmen quick-marched, then ran toward the depot, covering their heads from airborne missiles.

  Worse was to come. An officer of the other regiment ordered out, the Sixth, began leading his troops through the same streets where the Fifth had been attacked; by now nearly fifteen thousand protestors lay in wait. The regiment’s 150 troops—cursed at, spat upon, showered with bricks and stones—ran and then panicked under the bombardment; nearly half the troops deserted. Some who gamely remained in ranks fired their rifles into the air to scare off their tormentors; when that proved ineffectual, they leveled their guns at the crowd. Ten men and boys were killed by the soldiers’ fire.

  The depot itself proved no safe haven. A mob swarmed around the station and began vandalizing empty cars and equipment; one group of rioters commandeered a locomotive and managed to drive it entirely off the tracks, while another set fire to wooden freight cars on the south end of the train yard. Governor Carroll, who was himself trapped inside the station along with other state officials and National Guard officers, urgently telegraphed President Hayes for the army. Without hesitation, Hayes dispatched several federal units to the scene.

  By now the White House telegraph was clattering almost nonstop, as the workers’ insurrection—unguided by any organized trade union, yet abetted by throngs of angry citizens—spread from the B & O to the Pennsylvania Railroad. Trouble started on the Pennsylvania when the road announced that all freight trains bound east would be “doubleheaders”—a train with two locomotives and extra cars. Ordinarily a freight train was considered complete with seventeen cars, but doubleheaders often hauled as many as thirty-six. The doubling-up required one train crew to perform the work of two, allowing the railroad to discharge another crew from duty. Pittsburgh-based trainmen for the Pennsylvania had been following word of events in Martinsburg, and when at eight o’clock on the morning of Thursday, July 19, the call came to “shape up a doubleheader,�
�� a flagman named Gus Harris refused. Other railroad workers in the Pittsburgh yard were appealed to, but they chose to follow Harris’s example. When trainmaster David Garrett asked flagman Andrew Hice to get a train moving, Hice replied: “It’s a question of bread or blood, and we’re going to resist. If I go to the penitentiary I can get bread and water, and that’s about all I can get now.”108 Within an hour of Hice’s declaration, other trains were stopped and a formidable crowd of men and boys had gathered in the Pittsburgh yard.

  Railroad work stoppages in places like Martinsburg or Cumberland were inconvenient, to be sure, but Pittsburgh was a major rail crossroads and the nation’s leading industrial city. With its oil refineries, glass factories, iron mills, and steel rolling mills in almost continuous operation, the town by night, its smokestacks belching flames, was said to resemble “Hell with the lid off.”109 The ramifications of a strike there would be felt within a few hours across the entire country.

  At first, efforts by local authorities to contain the situation were almost comical. Pittsburgh police ranks had been thinned by recent layoffs, so no more than eight officers were available for emergency duty in the train yards; meanwhile, a militia unit that showed up soon stacked its weapons and began mingling amicably with the strikers. “The laboring people … will not take up arms to put down their brethren,” a striker told a reporter. “Will capital, then, rely on the United States Army? Pshaw!” He warned that even federal forces “would be swept from our path like leaves in the whirlwind.”110

  The rapidly spreading railroad strike was difficult for authority to confront for the simple reason that it was unorganized—the largely spontaneous acting out by embittered workers of “mischievous passions … easily wrought to excess and desperation.”111 But the circumstances did create instantaneous leadership. In Pittsburgh, a rail federation called the Trainmen’s Union had emerged in early June, its spokesman a twenty-five-year-old brakeman named Robert Ammons. The union sought to organize all railroad men under one flag, a departure from the traditionally stratified and not always cooperative brotherhoods of engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors. On the evening of July 19 Ammons’s group rallied at Phoenix Hall on Pittsburgh’s Eleventh Street, where resolutions were struck to continue opposition to the Pennsylvania’s doubleheader policy. The list of other demands drawn up included a restoration of wages as received prior to June 1, rehiring of men dismissed for strike activities, and the equalizing of pay for certain job classifications. A visiting mill worker assured the railroaders of his support: “We’re with you. We’re in the same boat. I heard a reduction of ten per cent hinted at in our mill this morning. I won’t call employers despots, I won’t call them tyrants, but the term capitalists is sort of synonymous and will do as well.”112 By the next night, the elite Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers had joined the Trainmen’s Union, evidence of growing worker solidarity against the major roads.

  Meanwhile, the brief holiday of Pittsburgh militia setting aside their duties and their guns came to an end. City officials had arranged to bring in six hundred troops of the First Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard from Philadelphia, a crack militia unit composed in part of Civil War veterans. There was a tradition of antagonism between the western areas of Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia, and the First’s “invasion” of Pittsburgh—it arrived in a convoy of two trains with several pieces of artillery and a Gatling gun—was vehemently resented. Even as the troop trains came into view at the outskirts of Pittsburgh, they already showed extensive damage from the stones, bricks, and chunks of coal with which they’d been bombarded as they’d passed through Harrisburg, Altoona, and other towns. Many of the trains’ windows were broken and debris covered the rooftops.

  The welcome was equally hostile at the corner of Liberty Street and Twenty-eighth, where the soldiers faced a crowd of six thousand strikers and spectators who pelted them with a barrage of projectiles. The troops, hemmed in by the infuriated crowd, fired into the air, but a second volley was far more lethal, mowing down scores of people and killing twenty, including an eighteen-year-old local militiaman. The wounded included women and small children.

  The town seethed in reaction. “Shot in Cold Blood by the Roughs of Philadelphia. The Lexington of the Labor Conflict Is at Hand,” blasted one local headline. As the dead were grieved over and carried away, “howling crowds paraded the streets, and it was not safe to say a word against the strikers, as a blow would follow its utterance,” reported the New York Times, which headlined its coverage “A Terrible Day in Pittsburgh.”113 James Bonn & Sons, a prominent weapons dealer, was sacked of guns and ammunition. Some protestors managed to lay hands on rifles abandoned earlier by the local militia. These armed citizens then laid siege to the roundhouse, where the Philadelphia soldiers had taken cover after the shooting. The mob captured the soldiers’ rations wagons, thus denying them food and water, but more dramatic measures were deemed necessary to deal with the cowards who had fired upon and killed innocent people.

  The roundhouse, to the misfortune of those inside, lay at the bottom of an incline, and the crowd, unable to lure the invaders out, seized freight cars loaded with oil and coal, set them ablaze, and pushed them downhill toward the building. By Sunday morning the roundhouse was on fire and the captive guardsmen had no choice but to evacuate as best they could. “It was better to run the risk of being shot down than burned to death, and so we filed out in a compact body,” one recalled. “It was lively times, I tell you, reaching the U.S. Arsenal…. I thought we should all be cut to pieces.”114 Some had changed into civilian clothes in the hope of blending into the crowd. Several soldiers were struck by bullets as they headed for the safety of the arsenal, prompting a commander to order a Gatling gun fired to disperse those who continued to harass the troops. The mob, its fury unquenched, then turned on the railroad’s property and the downtown area, burning, looting, and destroying.115 More than a hundred locomotives and two thousand freight cars were savaged, along with a grain elevator and the city’s main passenger depot.

  Residents awoke the next day to the sight of a huge plume of smoke over the rail yards and the newspaper headline “Pittsburgh Sacked—The City Completely in the Power of a Howling Mob.” In truth the mob, having rioted itself to exhaustion, had largely gone home, but two square miles of America’s greatest industrial city lay in near-total ruin.

  BY NOW THE GREAT STRIKE OF 1877 had taken on a life of its own, causing violence and turmoil on a scale unprecedented in America’s peacetime history. In many places it assumed the form of spontaneous turnouts, as laborers at pipe works, tanneries, hog yards, mines, and rolling mills walked off. In Galveston, black longshoremen led a strike action demanding $2 per day, and were soon joined by whites. At Louisville, black sewer workers attacked the Louisville and Nashville Railroad while a marauding group of white strikers closed some factories and besieged others, urging textile workers, carpenters, and mechanics to join them. Sympathy strikes and sabotage tied up railroads from Worcester to San Francisco. So quickly did the fracas become widespread, a newspaper in Chicago telling of the rebellion’s arrival required only the succinct headline “It Is Here!”

  Chicago could hardly expect a reprieve. It was the nation’s key rail hub, and its large and impoverished working class provided a tinderbox of discontent. The Workingmen’s Party (WP), the first Marxist-influenced political party in America, organized in Philadelphia in 1876, was active there with a substantial following of foreign-born laborers. It was led by two well-spoken Americans, Philip Van Patten and Albert Parsons. Van Patten was educated, a draftsman by trade. Parsons was an ex-Confederate officer driven from the South for his liberal ideas; and in Chicago he had been drawn into politics, running unsuccessfully for alderman.

  With Parsons and Van Patten at the lead, the WP channeled the strike’s energy coming out of the East with local resentment against railroads and authority in general. On the evening of Monday the twenty-third, Parsons went before a crowd
of thirty thousand on Market Street to appeal to unemployed war veterans; he urged the heroes of the Grand Army of the Republic—now soldiers in what he termed a “Grand Army of Starvation”—to join “the Grand Army of Labor.”

  “A mighty spirit is animating the hearts of the American people today,” he declared of the rail strike. “When I say the American people I mean the backbone of the country …”

  The crowd responded with boisterous cheers.

  “ … the men who till the soil, who guide the machine, who weave the fabrics and cover the backs of civilized men. We are part of that people …”

  “We are! We are!”

  “ … and we demand that we be permitted to live, that we shall not be turned upon the earth as vagrants and tramps.”

  The thousands roared their approval, taking up the chant, “Pittsburgh! Pittsburgh! Pittsburgh!”116

  Local commerce boarded up its storefronts as if in anticipation of a hurricane and waited in fear as the violence grew overnight in fervency, spreading rapidly from the rail yards to the packinghouses, to clothing plants, brickyards, and streetcars. The Chicago Board of Trade, a committee of businessmen led by retailers Marshall Field and Levi Leiter, hired Pinkerton guards, organized private militias to keep watch over affluent residential areas, and authorized the use of their store delivery wagons to transport police reinforcements.

  By Tuesday, July 24, the police elected to meet rabble with rabble, hiring unemployed toughs as “special deputies” and arming them with clubs to clear the rail yards. Into the next day there were skirmishes, the beating of rioters by police squads and vigilantes, and several fatalities. Thursday morning found a squad of police surrounded by a mob of five thousand on the west side near a viaduct where Halsted Street crossed Sixteenth Street. “The mob began to gather, and surged up and down on the sidewalk and in the street—a howling, yelping mob of irresponsible idiots,” said Harper’s Weekly. Hand-to-hand combat ensued, as the cornered police swung their clubs, “hitting to hurt.”117 The struggle with fists, batons, stones, and pistols lasted into the afternoon, claiming numerous lives. That evening the police, now barely discriminating in their attacks, stormed a meeting of the Furniture-Workers Union at Vorwaerts Turner Hall on Twelfth Street. The hall’s proprietor, a Mr. Wasserman, was knocked down by the police as they charged into the gathering; the laborers, caught by surprise, defended themselves with the only weapons available: pieces of furniture. A worker named Tessman was slain by gunfire, bringing the total number of victims in the Chicago violence to thirty.118