by Philip Dray
If the Great Strike was convincing of anything, it was that the shift of national concern from Reconstruction to the North’s festering labor problems had been prescient. The whiff of class upheaval in the smoke wafting from burning train yards, the bloody encounters between rioters and police or soldiers, the dead being carried away from the barricades, appalled the entire country. Equally distressing was the relative ease with which the rebellion had halted the nation’s business. Less than a decade before America had celebrated its new transcontinental rail network; now railmen and their allies had shown that they, too, could unite coast-to-coast; extraordinary as the country’s transportation system was, it was now revealed to be only as impregnable as its least contented workers.
One clear lesson that might have been drawn from the disturbances was that capital would be better off if strike actions were brought by “established” workers’ organizations, so that corporations and authorities could deal openly with such groups. While the rhetoric of organized strikers could be fierce, even insurrectionary, what they generally were after was respect, recognition, and the acknowledgment (and acceptance) of their demands. Such things could be discussed and negotiated. The alternative—armed boys and men, as well as some women, unaffiliated with any union or subject to group discipline, rioting, and vandalizing—brought only chaos.
But no such analysis emerged from the powerful. Instead, B & O president John W. Garrett was indignant that soldiers did not more willingly shoot rioters; Jay Gould, who had built up the Erie and now was developing the Union Pacific, suggested that perhaps what the nation most needed was a monarchy. Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad suggested that the hungry strikers try “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.”119 The nation’s editorial pages were filled with similarly indignant sentiments.
While the 1877 strike is recalled chiefly for its extreme violence and destruction, it actually attained what may have been its fullest fruition in a relatively peaceful general strike at St. Louis. With its eighteen-mile stretch of flour mills, breweries, foundries, and meatpacking plants abreast the Mississippi River, the city was one of the nation’s busiest ports. For years it had been a portal to the frontier West; now, with the advance of the railroads, it had assumed more the identity of a shipping crossroads. But the economic downturn of the 1870s had hit the town particularly hard. The National Bank of the State of Missouri had been forced to close in early 1877, and many other businesses followed. Thousands were left jobless. As a local paper warned, the city’s poor and out-of-work didn’t fully understand what had “struck them down and blasted their lives,” yet “they see the sharp contrast between their sufferings and the splendor of the rich; they have been made desperate by want, they are ready to follow any leader.”120
Unlike Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, there was no street fighting in St. Louis, but because the general strike—probably the country’s first—so thoroughly choked off the town’s commerce and industry, it was the more frightening to established interests. The possibility of “an American Commune” became quite real to local merchants and men of property when the Workingmen’s Party led ten thousand in phalanx down the city’s broad avenues singing “La Marseillaise,” and a speaker reminded the crowd of “a time in the history of France when the poor found themselves oppressed to such an extent that forbearance ceased to be a virtue, and hundreds of heads tumbled into the basket. That time may have arrived with us.”121 Dismayed by what was occurring and being said in the streets, the St. Louis Republican lost no time in concluding, “It is wrong to call this a strike, it is labor revolution!”
Racial solidarity was achieved when black stevedores joined the ranks of the strikers. At one point a black man astride a muscular white horse galloped through the factory streets, beseeching workers to set their tools down and come out. Even the town’s newsboys struck, declining to peddle newspapers. “All you have to do, gentlemen, for you have the numbers,” a strike leader exhorted a rally, “is to unite on one idea—that the workingmen shall rule the country. What man makes belongs to him, and the workingmen made this country.”122
The strikers did “have the numbers,” and so St. Louis employers, stunned by their militancy and made uneasy by the allusions to the guillotine’s efficacy, hastily agreed to some wage hikes and shorter hours without a loss of pay. In a double cross, however, many of the offers were rescinded after the U.S. Army arrived, martial law was declared, and eighty strike leaders were arrested; these included several prominent Workingmen’s Party figures seen leaping from the windows of their headquarters in a futile attempt to evade the police.
THE UPHEAVAL OF SUMMER 1877 has always eluded easy explanation. The first labor revolt in American history to spread into a national civil disorder, it channeled not only the exasperation of the eighty thousand rail workers who walked away from their jobs, but the anger and sympathy of countless other workers and the unemployed. “The Republic had celebrated its Centennial in July, 1876,” historian David Burbank offers. “Exactly a year later, the industrial working class of the nation celebrated its coming of age.”123
There was an effort by a stunned nation to pin the disturbances on “communistic influences” imported by foreigners, but while this charge may have been somewhat applicable to the St. Louis movement, it was an inadequate characterization overall, given the large number of participants and the inability to find any organization responsible for the strike or even a specific objective. More likely it was simply reassuring to assume that a disturbance that so resembled a class uprising could not possibly be American in origin. As a few editorialists quipped, most of the rioters could not, if queried, have explained what a “Communist” was, and even President Hayes poured cold water on the idea of alien influence by pointing out that the people’s vengeance had been directed primarily at the railroads, not property per se. Still, the “Communist” label, once affixed to workingmen, would prove difficult to peel off. “War between labor and capital has begun in earnest,” said the New Orleans Times of the summer’s events. “America’s first experience in communism is now the most significant episode of the most extraordinary year in our political history.”124
It is a revealing measure of how serious the threat posed by labor radicalism seemed in 1877 that a concerted response to the railroad troubles was to expand the National Guard and improve ways to coordinate its equipment and readiness. With the urging and support of leaders of commerce, Northern cities undertook to build armories in concentrated urban industrial areas, for as Harper’s Weekly noted, “The country has learned the necessity of a thorough and efficient local armed organization.”125 Over the years Americans have come to think of these dour, substantial buildings as historic rallying places for troops in the case of foreign threats to U.S. soil, but their original purpose was to allow the rapid deployment of the militia to keep workingmen in check.
Were the armories necessary? Were the fears of “labor revolution” and “an American Commune” legitimate? At the time the answer appeared far from certain. Historically, U.S. business interests, the courts, the press, have been overly quick to discern conspiracy and foreign influence in labor’s struggle for fundamental goals such as better pay, hours, and working conditions. Nonetheless, some conservative anxiety was perhaps understandable in 1877, given that what workers appeared to be challenging were the laissez-faire principles upon which the nation’s economy rested. And although labor technically “lost” the railroad strike, its actions inchoate and its gains temporary or few, there was no denying that the scope and vehemence of the outburst had changed perceptions of laboring people and the poor in ways that surprised the whole country, including the workers themselves. What labor had won was a new appreciation of its own strength, and of the power of the strike.
“The calcium light that illumined the skies of our social and industrial life,” Socialist George Schilling termed the upheaval126 opening the country’s eyes irrevocably to the frustr
ations of a large underclass of its own citizens—those who lived on the margins, enduring joblessness, inadequate housing and sanitation, at times facing starvation. It was increasingly evident this was an American dilemma, that there was something fundamentally wrong with the persistence of such dire want in the midst of the world’s greatest democracy. “Middle class people began at last to realize what ‘survival of the fittest’ implied, and to reject it,” notes historian Robert Bruce. “More than that, they began to question its corollary of rugged individualism.”127 Harper’s Weekly, a barometer of middle-class opinion, fretted that the strike had revealed “a vast movement of the poor against the rich, of labor against capital, which is nothing less than absolute anarchy,”128 but went on to suggest it was high time this suffering became “the business of the State, that is, the people, to prevent disorder of the kind that we saw in the summer, by removing the discontent which is its cause.”129 Voters appeared to agree. That fall the Workingmen’s Party in Louisville elected five men to the Kentucky state legislature, and with the news from Kentucky serving as a catalyst, Workingmen’s groups organized around the nation, running candidates for offices across the electoral spectrum. “The laissez-faire policy,” one newspaper concluded, “has been knocked out of men’s heads for the next generation.”130
For longer than that many Americans would look back to the summer of 1877 as a turning point, a season whose disruptions helped stir to life multiple strains of reform—the muckrakers’ exposé of corruption and corporate excess, the settlement house movement and its determination to educate and lift up the immigrant worker and poor urban dweller, and the growth of oppositional political consciousness in both city and countryside. Even in the sanctum of the White House the momentous change in outlook found expression. “The strikes have been put down by force,” President Hayes confided to his diary, “but now for the real remedy.”131
CHAPTER THREE
WE MEAN TO HAVE EIGHT HOURS
TO TERENCE V. POWDERLY, GRAND MASTER Workman of the Knights of Labor, the group’s philosophy, “an injury to one is a concern to all,” always held special meaning. His conversion to the necessity of labor unity had occurred on September 6, 1869, as he watched the bodies of the 179 victims of the Avondale mine disaster brought to the surface and returned to their grieving families. A twenty-year-old railroad machinist, Powderly had until that moment felt “no more cause for complaint of ill-treatment in the shop I worked in than hundreds of other young men, and had I considered my own selfish interests alone it is quite likely I would never have affiliated with any labor organization. [But] when I saw a mother kneel in silent grief to hold the cold, still face of her boy to hers, and when I saw her fall lifeless on his dead body, I experienced a sensation that I have never forgotten.” John Siney of the Workers Benevolent Association spoke to the gathered sufferers, and Powderly thought he saw Christ in Siney’s face and heard a new Sermon on the Mount. “I there resolved to do my part, humble though it may be, to improve the condition of those who worked for a living.”1
Five years later, in 1874, Powderly joined the recently founded Knights, which had grown out of a small Philadelphia tailors’ union, and whose guiding light, Uriah S. Stephens, shared Powderly’s conviction that bettering workers’ lives was a sacred cause. A garment cutter and aspiring Baptist minister, Stephens had been inspired by the Freemasons and other mystical orders in devising a structure of elaborate titles and offices for the Knights (he declared himself Grand Master Workman) as well as secret rituals, such as never writing out the organization’s name, but instead designating it with five asterisks.
As their name implied, the Knights insisted on the inherent nobility of labor. Like the National Labor Union, they believed the amassed power of capital could be met successfully only by an organization representing the broadest possible community of workingmen. To their ranks Stephens and Powderly welcomed men and women of any race, of all crafts and levels of skill, as well as previously unorganized laborers such as laundresses and tobacco harvesters. So certain was their belief that Americans of good conscience shared the desire for sweeping reform in the dynamic between labor and capital, even employers were encouraged to join.2
Powderly succeeded Stephens as Grand Master Workman in 1878 after Stephens, disavowing his usual contempt for politics, ran and lost in a bid for a congressional seat on a Greenback-Labor ticket. Stephens departed the Knights (and died a short time later), although his ideas survived under the leadership of Powderly, who shared Stephens’s doubts regarding the wage system and hopes that working citizens might own the means of production. Like Stephens, Powderly had also succumbed to politics, in 1878 becoming the mayor of Scranton.
Powderly, as the labor reporter John Swinton wrote at the time, hardly looked the part of “the leader of a million of the horny-fisted sons of toil.”3 With his small build, bookish mien, and delicate features, he more closely resembled a country parson. In the mode of Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife, Lucy, known as “Lemonade Lucy” for her banishment of liquor from the White House, Powderly was a strict teetotaler and obsessed with the need for temperance among union members. He eschewed giving speeches in casual settings where workers might be drinking beer, warning his aides, “I will talk at no picnics.”4
The Knights reprised some of the objectives of the NLU, such as cooperatives, land and currency reform, an end to child labor, and economic parity between male and female laborers. In lieu of strikes, which Powderly associated with the railroad troubles of 1877 and considered “a relic of barbarism,” the group pursued what he called “uplift,” the gradualist improvement of workers’ lives through long-term goals like public ownership of the railroads and the disciplining of wayward employers through worker boycotts of consumer products. They established 135 manufacturing cooperatives in areas as diverse as coal mining, cooperage, printing, and shoemaking. Unfortunately all struggled and eventually sank under the same general lack of financing and market skills that had doomed similar NLU experiments. These mostly fruitless efforts drained the Knights’ treasury, while the organization’s ambivalent and inconsistent attitude toward strikes made its course difficult. Particularly infuriating to members was Powderly’s habit of tentatively backing strike actions, only to then withdraw support and recommend conciliation with employers. He also kept the rank and file on edge with his flair for melodrama, announcing frequently that he could no longer carry on the responsibilities of his office, but then fiercely defending his leadership when others appeared willing to accept his departure.
In spite of Powderly’s quirks and distaste for work stoppages, the group did claim several strike victories against the railroads beginning in 1882. These led ultimately to a showdown in 1885 with the nation’s most powerful railroad financier, Jay Gould. When Gould tried to smash a regional railroad union affiliated with the Knights, Powderly heroically demanded and won a face-to-face meeting, the first time the leader of an American workers’ organization had been granted such an encounter with a major capitalist. Gould, no friend of labor, was notorious for the remark, “I can hire half the working class to shoot the other half,” but the meeting with Powderly resulted in a significant breakthrough—Gould’s agreement to stop targeting the Knights and to accept their right to organize. For his part, Powderly vowed that the Knights would not strike Gould’s railroads again without first engaging in direct consultation with management. This unprecedented bringing to terms of as feared a monopolist as Gould greatly enhanced the Knights’ reputation, sending their membership soaring from one hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand in just one year. With lighter hearts and a new swagger they sang,
Storm the fort, ye Knights of Labor,
Battle for your cause;
Equal rights for every neighbor–
Down with Tyrant laws!5
So completely did the Knights, with this membership surge, assume domination of the U.S. labor movement, there were rumblings of concern among business interests and in edito
rial pages at the prospect of a national labor organization so powerful it would be capable of launching strike campaigns potentially crippling to commerce. Particularly worrisome was the group’s long-term agenda items such as the nationalization of the railroads and other industries. Labor union activity confined to workplace issues was vexing enough; messianic movements fostering economic revolution were unacceptable.
Such anxiety on the part of the establishment proved premature, for the group was soon humbled at the hands of the same Jay Gould whose earlier capitulation had led to its overnight rise. The trouble began when a Knights-federated rail union struck without Powderly’s say-so, taking three thousand trainmen off their jobs. Gould responded swiftly, accusing the Grand Master Workman of abnegating the nonstrike agreement; Gould then called in Pinkerton detectives and state militia, and hired anti-labor toughs to safeguard replacement workers. He ordered strike meetings broken up and labor-sympathetic journalists intimidated. The strikers, and the Knights leadership, came in for criticism for inconveniencing the national rail system and selfishly “trying to introduce into modern society a new right … the right to be employed by people who do not want you and who cannot afford to pay what you ask.”6 Powderly offered to negotiate, but Gould, sensing he’d gained the upper hand, remained aloof. Ultimately, with the rail workers beset by Gould’s hired guns and the rail baron refusing to once again join Powderly at the bargaining table, the latter withdrew the Knights’ formal support of the strike and demanded the trainmen return to their jobs. It was an all-out defeat for the Knights, as dispiriting to its members as it was heartening for critics.