American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

by H. W. Brands

  Prudence suggested that Scott capitulate, but he was too proud and stubborn. Instead he called a June 4 meeting with a delegation from the engineers’ union. He described the dire condition of the company and explained the need for cost savings. The shareholders had done their part, he said; dividends had been cut 40 percent. It was only fair for the workers to accept a cut. So far the workers had given back a mere 20 percent; surely they could give a bit more. Otherwise they all—Scott included himself here—might be out of jobs.

  Scott hadn’t risen to the top of the railroad industry without possessing skills of persuasion, and the workers’ committee left this meeting accepting Scott’s argument, if reluctantly. They managed to get the leaders of most of the local chapters of the union to join them. But longshoremen at the Penn’s docks in New York, suffering from a recent pay cut that put their hourly wage at thirteen and a half cents (down from twenty cents before the cutting began), staged a wildcat strike.

  The stoppage didn’t last. Scott offered to restore a half cent to the wage even as he ordered other company workers to fill in for the striking dockers. Between the promise and the threat, the longshoremen felt compelled to take the half penny and return to work.19

  Scott’s success inspired other railroads to institute similar cuts and to require workers to sign “yellow dog” contracts banning unions. “I do agree to keep out of all combinations of men encouraging strikes, and in case of strikes or combinations, will work faithfully for the company’s interest,” a typical contract read. But the cuts and the contractual duress caused the resentment against the railroads to fester and grow. Penn workers in Pittsburgh formed a new organization, the Trainmen’s Union, that aimed to unite all railroad workers against the companies. Several hundred men signed up at once, despite infiltration by company spies and orders by company executives to fire any workers who joined the new union.20

  At Martinsburg, West Virginia, workers on the Baltimore & Ohio who had recently been recruited to the Trainmen’s Union reacted to the pay cuts by seizing a cattle train, detaching its locomotives, and stranding the cars on the main east-west line. The mayor of Martinsburg called out the police, but the townspeople, who had long chafed at their dependence on the railroad, sided with the workers, hoisting the brakeman who had initiated the stoppage to their shoulders and parading him heroically about the town.

  Company officials appealed to the governor of the state, Henry Mathews, for protection of their property. Mathews weighed the votes of the workers and their friends against the money and influence of the railroads and chose the latter. He summoned the militia and ordered it to ensure the safety of the trains and the freedom of commerce. A special train carrying the state troops approached Martinsburg, where it was surrounded by a jeering mob. One of the strikers had thrown a derail switch; as the train slowly approached, an armed soldier leaped down and tried to restore the switch to its safe position. The striker fired a pistol at the soldier, who shot back, hitting the man in the head but miraculously not killing him. Other soldiers, however, opened fire, fatally wounding the striker.

  Within minutes reports of the shootings flew east and west along the telegraph wires that flanked the rail line. Governor Mathews grew alarmed and appealed to President Rutherford Hayes for help. “Owing to unlawful combinations and domestic violence now existing at Martinsburg and at other points along the line of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, it is impossible with any force at my command to execute the laws of the State,” Mathews wrote. “I therefore call upon your Excellency for the assistance of the United States military.” The head of the B&O, John Garrett, seconded the appeal. “This great national highway,” Garrett told Hayes, referring to the railroad, “can only be restored for public use by the interposition of the U.S. forces.” Garrett warned that the fate of the nation hung in the balance: “Unless this difficulty is immediately stopped, I apprehend the gravest consequences, not only upon our line, but upon all the lines in the country which, like ourselves, have been obliged to introduce measures of economy in these trying times.”21

  Hayes had dealt with the insurrection of the South during the Civil War, when he served as major general in the Union army. After the war, as governor of Ohio, he had deployed his state’s militia to counter a coal miners’ strike there. Now, as leader of the party of business and the recipient of campaign donations from Tom Scott and other railroad executives, he acted with equal decisiveness in ordering federal troops from the arsenal at Washington and from Fort McHenry at Baltimore to Martinsburg.22

  The federal force quelled the uprising in West Virginia, which had begun to dissipate on its own. But the troubles leapfrogged the troop train to Baltimore. Maryland’s first city was reeling from the depression; industrial workers, who constituted perhaps a third of the labor force, had suffered job reductions and pay cuts that were, if anything, worse than those afflicting the railroad engineers. “The working people everywhere are with us,” one rail unionist told a reporter. “They know what it is to bring up a family on ninety cents a day, to live on beans and corn meal week in and week out, to run in debt at the stores until you cannot get trusted any longer, to see the wife breaking down under privation and distress, and the children growing sharp and fierce like wolves day after day because they don’t get enough to eat.”

  As a result, when Baltimore rail workers struck the B&O in July 1877, a friendly populace applauded them. “There is no disguising the fact that the strikers in all their lawful acts have the fullest sympathy of the community,” the Baltimore Sun reported. Even the unlawful acts evoked substantial support. When the governor summoned the state militia to keep the strikers in line, Baltimore erupted in riot. Workers heaved rocks and bricks at the militiamen, who responded with rifle fire. Members of the crowd—which the vice president of the B&O called “the fiercest mob ever known in Baltimore”—produced firearms of their own, and the streets of the city became shooting galleries. One part of the crowd cornered a regiment of militia in the railroad station while others began destroying rail stock. Three men (or boys: to some witnesses they looked quite young) commandeered a locomotive, built up a full head of steam, opened the throttle, and jumped off to watch with glee as the engine crashed into some railcars before taking out a loading platform, shattering a dispatcher’s office, and overturning itself with its wheels still spinning.

  The terrified militiamen effected their escape by charging through the crowd with leveled bayonets. The crowd retreated but continued its destruction of railroad property, ripping rails from the ties, breaking windows, and setting trains alight. When firemen arrived to battle the blaze, the rioters cut their hoses and sabotaged their pumps.

  Nightfall brought the calm of exhaustion and a reckoning of the casualties. At least ten people were dead, all of them members of the crowd. Additional dozens, including several militiamen, were wounded. Property damage was impossible to estimate so long as some of the fires still burned.23

  THE VIOLENCE SPREAD to Pittsburgh. The depression had hammered the steel city, and though the steel industry was slowly recovering, the plants were operating far below capacity. Millworkers were restive and willing to lend support to their fellows of the rails. “We’re with you,” a steelman told the local of the Trainmen’s Union. “We’re in the same boat. I heard a reduction of ten per cent hinted at in our mills 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.”

  The labor solidarity spooked the guardians of the status quo. The Pittsburgh Leader reported what it deemed the ravings of a “representative workingman” who had declared that the recent events “may be the beginning of a great civil war in this country, between labor and capital.” The union man told the governor not to bother calling out the militia. “The laboring people, who mostly constitute the militia, will not take up arms to put down their brethren,” he predicted. Should President Hayes send in the army, the federal troops would be “swept f
rom our path like leaves in the whirlwind.” America belonged to its people. “The workingmen of this country can capture and hold it, if they will only stick together.” The capitalists might win a round or two, but the workers would finally “have our revenge on the men who have coined our sweat and muscle into millions for themselves.”24

  The local militia commander braced for the worst. Having orders to keep the peace but distrusting the Pittsburgh militiamen to fire on their neighbors, he requested reinforcements from Philadelphia. He prepared for their arrival by mounting two cannons above a road crossing of the Penn tracks. As the troop trains from Philadelphia approached the crossing, hundreds of workers and their supporters clogged the road and the track. The crowd pelted the trains with epithets, rocks, and paving stones. Rifle barrels ominously emerged from the train windows. But to the obvious relief of most and the apparent disappointment of some, no one fired. The trains inched slowly through the crowd to the downtown depot.

  There the six hundred militiamen debarked from the cars and got ready to return to the crossing to clear the crowd. A Pittsburgh steel manufacturer, James Park, warned Alexander Cassatt of the Penn against hasty action. It was Saturday afternoon, and most of the steelworkers had started their weekend, which meant they were drinking and were available to join the rail workers. “I think I know the temper of our men pretty well,” Park told Cassatt. “You would be wise not to do anything until Monday.” He added that Cassatt didn’t have enough militia. “If there’s going to be firing, you ought to have at least ten thousand men, and I doubt if even that many could quell the mob that would be brought down on us.”

  Cassatt closed his ears. “We must have our property,” he declared. “We have lost an hour and a half’s time.”

  The militia moved out, shouldering rifles and pulling two Gatling guns. At the head of the column were the sheriff and more than a dozen deputies, carrying warrants for the arrest of eleven workers alleged to be instigators of the strike.

  By now the crowd at the crossing numbered several thousand. They shouted at the soldiers and cursed the sheriff and the deputies. Many of the militia felt torn. One of their officers later observed, “Meeting an enemy on the field of battle, you go there to kill. The more you kill, and the quicker you do it, the better. But here you had men with fathers and brothers and relatives mingled in the crowd of rioters. The sympathy of the people, the sympathy of the troops, my own sympathy, was with the strikers.… We all felt that those men were not receiving enough wages.” But the officer had his job, and his orders. “The tracks must be cleared,” he said.

  The men leveled their bayonets and pushed into the crowd. Those persons closest to the troops started to move away, but the wall of flesh behind them prevented escape. Some turned and tried to wrest the rifles from the soldiers’ grasp. Meanwhile members of the crowd farther away began hurling stones and chunks of coal at the troops. A witness recalled that one soldier “had the whole side of his face knocked off by a brick.”

  The crowd taunted the soldiers: “Shoot, you sons of bitches, why don’t you shoot?” Firecrackers left over from Independence Day, just two weeks earlier, began exploding. Someone fired real shots—perhaps one of the soldiers, frightened for his life, perhaps a member of the crowd. The militia officers later denied having given the order to fire, but several said they would have done so if the firing hadn’t started on its own. In the time it took the crowd to realize that guns, and not firecrackers, were the source of the popping sounds heard over the general tumult, more than a dozen people were killed or fatally wounded. The casualties included women and children. A four-year-old girl’s knee was shattered by a rifle bullet, and the leg had to be amputated.

  The militia gained control of the crossing but in the bargain lost the city. “It was evident,” one reporter asserted, “that the whole labor interest of Pittsburgh was about to fight the Pennsylvania Railroad.” The crowd that abandoned the crossing regathered at the Penn rail yards three blocks away. Individuals began torching freight cars, and then cars containing coke for the steel mills, and then anything else that would burn. To spread the fire some of the strikers rolled the flaming cars downhill and deliberately derailed them, spilling their fiery contents across the tracks and grounds. A roundhouse caught fire. Meanwhile a second wing of the mob attacked a federal arsenal nearby, seizing its weapons, including some cannons; when firemen arrived to extinguish the roundhouse blaze, the rioters trained a cannon on them and forced them to let the building burn. New fires broke out in several places around the city, obviously set separately. Looters followed the arsonists and didn’t confine themselves to railroad property. During all of Saturday evening and into Sunday morning a general conflagration threatened the city.25

  Sunday newspapers weren’t common in the 1870s, but the events in Pittsburgh that weekend prompted publishers in several cities to print special editions. “Pittsburgh Sacked,” a typical headline read. “More Bloodshed!” The publishers doubtless believed they were doing their civic duty in reporting the breaking news; they certainly also appreciated the windfall profits the special editions generated. Not since the Civil War had papers sold so fast. The profit incentive trickled down to the newsboys who hawked the special editions on the street. “Strikers’ war!” they shouted. “Bloody battle in Pittsburgh!”

  Most editors condemned the violence, but a few of the Pittsburgh papers (in those days most cities had several papers) sided with the strikers. One called the ongoing events “the Lexington of the labor conflict.” Another, with a large working-class readership, asserted, “There is tyranny in this country worse than anything ever known in Russia.… Capital has raised itself on the ruins of labor. The laboring class cannot, will not stand this any longer. The war cry has been raised.… The principle that freed our nation from tyranny will free labor from domestic aggression.”26

  This hope of the workers was precisely the fear of the capitalists—and of many Americans with no such distinct class affiliations. Since the multinational revolutions of 1848, the “specter of communism,” as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels then put it, had been haunting Europe and the capitalist strongholds of America. But a more recent memory had a larger impact. In 1871 socialists in Paris had taken control of the French city, establishing a “commune,” a nascent workers’ republic that denied the primacy of capital and challenged existing property relations. The Communards employed lethal violence against their class enemies, who eventually rallied the army and crushed the socialist experiment. The corpses of tens of thousands of revolutionaries and their kin littered the streets of Paris.

  Every capitalist in America knew about the Paris Commune, and most had congratulated themselves that such anarchy wasn’t possible in America. But the events in Pittsburgh smacked hard of anarchy. “War between labor and capital has begun in earnest,” the New Orleans Times asserted. “America’s first experience in communism is now the most significant episode of the most extraordinary year in our political history.” The Pittsburgh Leader, in the article reporting the labor radical’s declaration of civil war between labor and capital, concluded, “It will be seen that he is really a communist.” The New York Times decried the “tyranny of trades-unionism” and the “reign of mob law.” The New York World wondered succinctly in a headline: “Riot or Revolution?”27

  THE STRIKE NOW spread across the country as tens of thousands of rail workers walked off the job. Many engaged in violence similar to that in Baltimore and Pittsburgh. In Buffalo an angry crowd besieged a militia regiment protecting a roundhouse of the Erie Railroad. Rocks rained down on the troops, who prepared to fire on their assailants. The crowd, painfully aware of the events at Pittsburgh, scattered—only to regroup at the yards of the New York Central. William Vanderbilt, who had learned some lessons himself from the Pittsburgh rioting, declined to challenge the strikers or fuel their arson. He simply suspended all New York Central traffic to Buffalo. The mob, eventually discerning Vanderbilt’s strategy, returned to the Erie
yards, where they seized trains and manhandled their replacement crews. When a train arrived carrying militia reinforcements, the crowd fired on and stormed the cars, provoking the soldiers to return fire. Several rioters were killed and a comparable number of the soldiers wounded. As Buffalo was less friendly to workers than Pittsburgh, the sheriff had little difficulty deputizing some three hundred citizens, who supplemented the regular Buffalo police force. The latter, armed with riot sticks, caught up with a small crowd burning some New York Central rolling stock Vanderbilt hadn’t managed to extricate. The police captain gave the order to charge. “Like lightning the clubs ascended and descended,” an appreciative reporter explained. “Every stroke hit a new head whose owner went solid to the ground or bowled in continued somersaults. The officers seemed to put their whole souls into this commendable work.… Those who did not get hit fled as fast as legs could carry them.… A howling chorus of pain could be heard at the high trestle more than a mile way. The rout was complete and final.”

  At Reading, Pennsylvania, rail workers and sympathizers sacked the depot of Franklin Gowen’s Reading Railroad. Lest they be fingered by company spies, the rioters painted their faces with coal dust before tearing up track, derailing and burning cars, and smashing equipment. They then marched to an iron-and-wooden bridge that spanned the Schuylkill River at the edge of town, soaked the timbers with coal oil, and set the structure ablaze. The bridge burned against the night sky till, to the cheers of the crowd, it crashed sizzling into the stream. Other rioters clashed with imported militiamen (some of whom came from the anthracite district, which they had patrolled on the day of the Molly Maguire hangings, to foil rescue attempts). Rocks and pistol fire struck the militiamen, who fired back at their assailants. Nearly a dozen persons were killed outright or mortally wounded.28