Learning Objectives
- Explain the importance of strikes and labor organization for the industrial working class
- Describe the work and the goals of labor unions, such as the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 heralded a new era of labor conflict in the United States. That year, mired in the stagnant economy that followed the bursting of the railroads’ financial bubble in 1873, rail lines slashed workers’ wages (even, workers complained, as they reaped enormous government subsidies and paid shareholders lucrative stock dividends). Workers struck from Baltimore to St. Louis, shutting down railroad traffic—the nation’s economic lifeblood—across the country.
Figure 1. “Destruction of the Union Depot,” Pittsburgh, PA, during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Engraving by M.B. Leiser in Harper’s Weekly, Journal of Civilization,” Vol XXL, No. 1076, New York, Saturday, August 11, 1877.
Panicked business leaders and friendly political officials reacted quickly. When local police forces would not or could not suppress the strikes, governors called out state militias to break them and restore rail service. Many strikers destroyed rail property rather than allow militias to reopen the rails. The protests approached a class war. The governor of Maryland deployed the state’s militia. In Baltimore, the militia fired into a crowd of striking workers, killing eleven and wounding many more. Strikes convulsed towns and cities across Pennsylvania. The head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas Andrew Scott, suggested that if workers were unhappy with their wages, they should be given “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.”[1] Law enforcement in Pittsburgh refused to put down the protests, so the governor called out the state militia, who killed twenty strikers with bayonets and rifle fire. A month of chaos erupted. Strikers set fire to the city, destroying dozens of buildings, over one hundred engines, and over a thousand railcars. In Reading, strikers destroyed rail property and an angry crowd bombarded militiamen with rocks and bottles. The militia fired into the crowd, killing ten people. A general strike erupted in St. Louis, and strikers seized rail depots and declared for the eight-hour day and the abolition of child labor. Federal troops and vigilantes fought their way into the depot, killing eighteen and breaking the strike. Rail lines were shut down all across neighboring Illinois, where coal miners struck in sympathy, tens of thousands gathered to protest under the aegis of the Workingmen’s Party, and twenty protesters were killed in Chicago by special police and militiamen.
Courts, police, and state militias suppressed the strikes, but it was federal troops that finally defeated them. When Pennsylvania militiamen were unable to contain the strikes, federal troops stepped in. When militia in West Virginia refused to break the strike, federal troops broke it instead. On the orders of President Rutherford B. Hayes, American soldiers were deployed all across northern rail lines. Soldiers moved from town to town, suppressing protests and reopening rail lines. Six weeks after it had begun, the strike had been crushed. Nearly 100 Americans died in what came to be known as “The Great Upheaval.” Workers destroyed nearly $40 million worth of property. The strike galvanized the country. It convinced laborers of the need for institutionalized unions, persuaded businesses of the need for even greater political influence and government aid, and foretold a half-century of labor conflict in the United States.
Worker Organization and the Struggles of Unions
Prior to the Civil War, there were limited efforts to create an organized labor movement on any large scale. With the majority of workers in the country working independently in rural settings, the idea of organized labor was not largely understood. But, as economic conditions changed, people became more aware of the inequities facing factory wage workers. By the early 1880s, even farmers began to fully recognize the strength of unity behind a common cause.
Business owners generally viewed organization efforts with great mistrust, capitalizing upon widespread anti-union sentiment among the general public to crush unions through a variety of tactics. Open shops banned labor unions from holding a monopoly over the employees of that particular company (Closed shops were those businesses that required employees to join a specific union upon hiring). In Open Shop businesses, therefore, employees could belong to any number of different unions, which weakened their collective bargaining power.
The use of strikebreakers was also common. If union members organized a strike and refused to work, companies would bring in new employees, usually recruited from extremely poor areas or directly off immigrant ships arriving from Europe or Asia, to work the factory and essentially oust the union employees from their jobs. The strikebreakers were usually incredibly desperate for work, as they were paid much lower wages, but they were also at risk of violent retaliation from the union members who resented them for being involved. Many employers also required new employees to sign yellow-dog contracts, which forced them to agree not to join a union as a pre-condition of employment.
Black & Immigrant American Labor
Workers also faced obstacles to union membership associated with race and ethnicity, as questions arose on how to address the increasing number of low-paid Black American workers who were beginning to move to Northern states to escape the cruelty of the Jim Crow South, in addition to the language and cultural barriers introduced by the large wave of European immigration to the United States. Many unions banned Black workers from joining, thus forcing them to become strikebreakers, work in Open Shops, or sign yellow-dog contracts that left them at a disadvantage compared to union members. However, many unions also understood that their power lay in collective bargaining and they could not leave a portion of workers out of that collective without risking their own power too.
Link to Learning
While some national labor unions, the Knights of Labor, were open to Black workers, many were either segregated or closed to all non-White people. Frustrated by the lack of representation, Black leaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries sought to create their own labor unions that would represent Black interests in the workforce. Later on, Black workers and labor unions would play a key role in the Civil Rights Movement alongside leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.
In large part, however, the greatest obstacle to effective unionization was the general public’s continued belief in a strong work ethic and that an individual work ethic—not organizing into radical collectives—would reap its own rewards. As violence erupted, such events seemed only to confirm widespread popular sentiment that radical, un-American elements were behind all union efforts.
Because Eastern European immigrants helped to establish many early efforts to unionize and were heavily employed by unionized industries like mining, many Americans also associated the organized labor movement with communism, particularly after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. Labor unions were viewed by many as being un-American and anti-capitalist because they did not operate on the idea of competition and so workers had no incentive to improve their skills in order to make more money. However, this attitude neglected the reality of industrial labor in America at the turn of the century: skilled labor and hard work were no longer the paths to a comfortable middle-class life. Workers were merely bodies, set to perform a task, and could be easily replaced by another body if they did not cooperate.
Models of Organizing
A combination of factors contributed to the debilitating Panic of 1873, which triggered what the public referred to at the time as the “Great Depression” of the 1870s. This panic and depression led to a rapid rise in the organized labor movement, as industrial and railroad workers felt the brunt of decreased wages, longer hours, and lost jobs. The railroad boom that had occurred from 1840 to 1870 was rapidly coming to a close. Overinvestment in the industry had extended many investors’ capital resources in the form of railroad bonds. However, when several economic developments in Europe led to a de facto gold standard that shrunk the U.S. monetary supply (remember when J.P. Morgan had to bail out the government with gold?), the amount of cash capital available for railroad investments rapidly declined. Several large business enterprises were left holding their wealth in all but worthless railroad bonds.
When Jay Cooke & Company, a leader in the American banking industry, declared bankruptcy on the eve of their plans to finance the construction of a new transcontinental railroad, the panic truly began. A chain reaction of bank failures culminated with the New York Stock Exchange suspending all trading for ten days at the end of September 1873. Within a year, over one hundred railroad enterprises had failed; within two years, nearly twenty thousand businesses had failed. The loss of jobs and wages sent workers throughout the United States seeking solutions and clamoring for scapegoats.
The Molly Maguires
In the 1870s, Irish coal miners in eastern Pennsylvania formed a secret organization known as the Molly Maguires, named for the famous Irish patriot. Through a series of scare tactics that included the destruction of mines and equipment, kidnappings, beatings, and even murder, the Molly Maguires sought to bring attention to the miners’ plight. Owners paid attention, but not in the way that the protesters had hoped. They hired detectives to pose as miners and mingle among the workers to obtain the names of the Molly Maguires. By 1875, they had acquired the names of twenty-four suspected Maguires, who were subsequently convicted of murder and violence against property. All were convicted and ten were hanged in 1876, at a public “Day of the Rope.” This harsh reprisal quickly crushed the remaining Molly Maguires movement. The only substantial gain the workers had from this episode was the knowledge that, lacking labor organization, sporadic violent protests would be met by escalated violence from owners and authorities alike. Organizers began to realize that the safest and best way, although maybe not the fastest, to get what they needed was to use the established political and legal system.
The National Labor Union
In 1866, seventy-seven delegates representing a variety of different occupations met in Baltimore to form the National Labor Union (NLU). The NLU had ambitious ideas about equal rights for African Americans and women, currency reform, and a legally mandated eight-hour workday. The organization was successful in convincing Congress to adopt the eight-hour workday for federal employees, but their reach did not progress much further. The Panic of 1873 and the economic recession that followed as a result of over-speculation on railroads and the subsequent closing of several banks—during which workers actively sought any employment regardless of the conditions or wages—as well as the death of the NLU’s founder, led to a decline in their efforts. Although the NLU proved to be the wrong effort at the wrong time, in the wake of the Panic of 1873 and the subsequent frustration exhibited in the failed Molly Maguires uprising and the national railroad strike, another, more significant, labor organization emerged.
The Knights of Labor
The Knights of Labor (KOL) was able to attract a more sympathetic following than the Molly Maguires and others by widening its base and appealing to more members. A Philadelphia tailor named Uriah Stephens grew the KOL from a small presence during the Panic of 1873 to an organization of national importance by 1878. That was the year the KOL held their first general assembly, where they adopted a broad reform platform, including a renewed call for an eight-hour workday, equal pay regardless of gender, the elimination of convict labor, and the creation of greater cooperative enterprises with worker ownership of businesses.
Much of the KOL’s strength came from its concept of “One Big Union”—the idea that it welcomed all wage workers, regardless of occupation, with the exception of doctors, lawyers, and bankers. It welcomed women, African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants, of all trades and skill levels. This was a notable break from the earlier tradition of craft unions, which were highly specialized and limited to a particular group. The Knights envisioned a cooperative producer-centered society that rewarded labor, not capital, but, despite their sweeping vision, the Knights focused on practical gains that could be won through the organization of workers into local unions. In 1879, a new leader, Terence V. Powderly, joined the organization, and he gained even more followers due to his marketing and promotional efforts.
In Marshall, Texas, in the spring of 1886, one of Jay Gould’s rail companies fired a Knights of Labor member for attending a union meeting. His local union walked off the job, and soon others joined. From Texas and Arkansas into Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois, nearly two hundred thousand workers struck against Gould’s rail lines. Gould hired strikebreakers and the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a kind of private security contractor, to suppress the strikes and get the rails moving again. Political leaders helped him, and state militias were called in support of Gould’s companies. The Texas governor called out the Texas Rangers. Workers countered by destroying property, only winning them negative headlines and for many justifying the use of strikebreakers and militiamen. The strike broke, briefly undermining the Knights of Labor, but the organization regrouped and set its eyes on a national campaign for the eight-hour day.
The Haymarket Riot of 1886
Figure 2. The Haymarket Affair, as it was known, began as a rally for the eight-hour workday. But when police broke it up, someone threw a bomb into the crowd, causing mayhem. The organizers of the rally, although not responsible, were sentenced to death. The affair and subsequent hangings struck a harsh blow against organized labor.
In one night, however, the KOL’s popularity—and indeed the momentum of the labor movement as a whole—plummeted due to an event known as the Haymarket Riot, or the Haymarket Affair, which occurred on May 4, 1886, in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. It began on May 1, 1886, recognized internationally as a day for labor celebration, when labor organizations around the country engaged in a national rally for the eight-hour workday. While the number of striking workers varied around the country, estimates are that between 300,000 and 500,000 workers protested in New York, Detroit, Chicago, and beyond. In Chicago, clashes between police and protesters led the police to fire into the crowd, resulting in two worker fatalities. Furious at this response to their largely nonviolent strike, labor leaders quickly organized another rally to protest the deaths, releasing the poster below to advertise it. The Haymarket Rally took place on May 4th, 1886.
Figure 3. This poster invited workers to a meeting denouncing the violence at the labor rally earlier in the week. Note that the invitation is written in both English and German, evidence of the large role that the immigrant population played in the labor movement.
Although the protest was quiet, the police arrived armed for conflict due to rumors of a violent German anarchist group associated with the Arbeiter-Zeitung newspaper, whose editors had helped organized the protest. August Spies, one of the editors and organizers, spoke to the crowd as the police approached, saying:
“There seems to prevail the opinion in some quarters that this meeting has been called for the purpose of inaugurating a riot, hence these warlike preparations on the part of so-called ‘law and order.’ However, let me tell you at the beginning that this meeting has not been called for any such purpose. The object of this meeting is to explain the general situation of the eight-hour movement and to throw light upon various incidents in connection with it.” [2]
As the police advanced and the rally leaders tried to maintain calm, someone in the crowd threw a bomb, killing one police officer and injuring another. Eight men associated with the Arbeiter-Zeitung, various anarchist groups, and the labor movement, including August Spies, were arrested and charged with murder, although the evidence was weak. Five of the men arrested were German immigrants and a sixth was a U.S. citizen born to German parents, causing a wave of anti-German and anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the nation. The trial for the Haymarket bombing was messy, with jurors who were proven to be biased against the labor movement and allegations that evidence was fabricated by the lead police detective.
Despite the aggressive actions of the police, public opinion was strongly against the striking laborers. The New York Times, after the events played out, reported on it with the headline “Rioting and Bloodshed in the Streets of Chicago: Police Mowed Down with Dynamite.” Other papers echoed the tone and often exaggerated the chaos, undermining organized labor’s efforts and leading to the ultimate conviction and hanging of the rally organizers. Labor activists considered those hanged after the Haymarket affair to be martyrs for the cause and created an informal memorial at their gravesides in Park Forest, Illinois.
In the end, all eight men were found guilty of murder, seven were sentenced to death, and one to 15 years in prison. Two of the men later received commuted sentences and one man committed suicide in his jail cell the night before his execution was scheduled. On November 11th, 1887, the last four men found guilty of the Haymarket bombing were executed by hanging: Adolph Fischer, the type-setter for the Arbeiter-Zeitung, Albert Parsons, an activist and newspaper editor who had spoken at the rally but then left before the bombing, George Engel, an activist who had never been at the Haymarket Rally at all, and August Spies, the editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung who had called for peace during his speech immediately before the bombing.
The press blamed the KOL as well as Terence Powderly for the Haymarket Riot, despite the fact that neither the organization nor Powderly had anything to do with the demonstration. Combined with the American public’s lukewarm reception of organized labor as a whole, the damage was done. The KOL saw its membership decline to barely 100,000 by the end of 1886. Nonetheless, during its brief success, the Knights illustrated the potential for success with their model of “industrial unionism,” which welcomed workers from all trades.
Link to learning: The Haymarket Riot and the press
An 1886 article from The New York Times, “Rioting and Bloodshed in the Streets of Chicago,” reveals how the newspaper reported on the Haymarket affair. Read through the article and think about whether the article gives evidence for the information it presents. Consider how it portrays the events, and how different, more sympathetic coverage might have changed the response of the general public towards immigrant workers and labor unions.
The American Federation of Labor
During the effort to establish industrial unionism in the form of the KOL, craft unions (unions for skilled workers) continued to operate. In 1886, twenty different craft unions met to organize a national federation of autonomous craft unions. This group became the American Federation of Labor (AFL), led by Samuel Gompers from its inception until his death in 1924. The AFL emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor, rejecting the Knights’ expansive vision of a “producerist” economy and advocating “pure and simple trade unionism,” a program that aimed for practical gains (higher wages, fewer hours, and safer conditions) through a conservative approach that tried to avoid strikes. More so than any of its predecessors, the AFL focused almost all of its efforts on economic gains for its members, seldom straying into political issues other than those that had a direct impact on working conditions. The AFL also kept a strict policy of not interfering in each union’s individual business. Rather, Gompers often settled disputes between unions, using the AFL to represent all unions of matters of federal legislation that could affect all workers, such as the eight-hour workday.
By 1900, the AFL had 500,000 members; by 1914, its numbers had risen to one million, and by 1920 they claimed four million working members. Still, as a federation of craft unions, it excluded many factory workers and thus, even at its height, represented only 15% of the non-farm workers in the country. As a result, even as the country moved towards an increasingly industrial age, the majority of American workers still lacked the support, protection from ownership, and access to upward mobility that union membership provided.
Interactive: The future of organized labor
You can find more about Labor Union Membership statistics here.
George Estes on the Order of Railroad Telegraphers
The following excerpt is a reflection from George Estes, an organizer and member of the Order of Railroad Telegraphers, a labor organization at the end of the nineteenth century. His perspective on the ways that labor and management related to each other illustrates the difficulties at the heart of their negotiations. He notes that, in this era, the two groups saw each other as enemies and that any gain by one was automatically a loss by the other.
I have always noticed that things usually have to get pretty bad before they get any better. When inequities pile up so high that the burden is more than the underdog can bear, he gets his dander up and things begin to happen. It was that way with the telegraphers’ problem. These exploited individuals were determined to get for themselves better working conditions—higher pay, shorter hours, less work which might not properly be classed as telegraphy, and the high and mighty Mr. Fillmore [railroad company president] was not going to stop them. It was a bitter fight. At the outset, Mr. Fillmore let it be known, by his actions and comments, that he held the telegraphers in the utmost contempt.
With the papers crammed each day with news of labor strife—and with two great labor factions at each other’s throats, I am reminded of a parallel in my own early and more active career. Shortly before the turn of the century, in 1898 and 1899 to be more specific, I occupied a position with regard to a certain class of skilled labor, comparable to that held by the Lewises and Greens of today. I refer, of course, to the telegraphers and station agents. These hard-working gentlemen—servants of the public—had no regular hours, performed a multiplicity of duties, and, considering the service they rendered, were sorely and inadequately paid. A telegrapher’s day included a considerable number of chores that present-day telegraphers probably never did or will do in the course of a day’s work. He used to clean and fill lanterns, block lights, etc. Used to do the janitor work around the small town depot, stoke the pot-bellied stove of the waiting-room, sweep the floors, picking up papers and waiting-room litter. . . .
Today, capital and labor seem to understand each other better than they did a generation or so ago. Capital is out to make money. So is labor—and each is willing to grant the other a certain amount of tolerant leeway, just so he doesn’t go too far. In the old days there was a breach as wide as the Pacific separating capital and labor. It wasn’t money altogether in those days, it was a matter of principle. Capital and labor couldn’t see eye to eye on a single point. Every gain that either made was at the expense of the other, and was fought tooth and nail. No difference seemed ever possible of amicable settlement. Strikes were riots. Murder and mayhem was common. Railroad labor troubles were frequent. The railroads, in the nineties, were the country’s largest employers. They were so big, so powerful, so perfectly organized themselves—I mean so in accord among themselves as to what treatment they felt like offering the man who worked for them—that it was extremely difficult for labor to gain a single advantage in the struggle for better conditions.
—George Estes, interview with Andrew Sherbert, 1938
Try It
Review Question
What were the core differences in the methods and agendas of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor?
Glossary
American Federation of Labor: a more conservative answer to the Knights of Labor, the AFL was a craft union for skilled workers that tried to avoid “radical” actions like strikes
August Spies: the editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language newspaper for union workers in Chicago; he was a speaker at the Haymarket Rally and tried to encourage calm and peace immediately before the bombing; he was subsequently arrested, found guilty of murder, and executed on very little evidence
Great Railroad Strike of 1877: a period of six weeks where railroad workers protested their low wages and working conditions by shutting down rail lines on the East Coast and in the Midwest or by destroying railroad property including tracks, cars, and depots; the riots were eventually put down by federal troops and over 100 workers were killed
Haymarket Riot: the rally and subsequent riot in which several policemen were killed when a bomb was thrown at a peaceful workers rights rally in Chicago in 1866
The Knights of Labor: a popular early labor union that was based on a philosophy of openness; the KoL welcomed all workers, including women and Black Americans, and only barred lawyers, bankers, and liquor dealers from their ranks; the KoL hoped to create a cooperative, producer-centered society that rewarded labor and not capital
Molly Maguires: a secret organization made up of Pennsylvania coal miners, named for the famous Irish patriot, which worked through a series of scare tactics to bring the plight of the miners to public attention
Open Shop policy: a business policy where workers are not required to join a specific union in order to work for that company (as they must in a closed shop); this limits the power of collective bargaining by splitting employees into different union or non-unionized groups
strikebreakers: workers who are brought in during a strike to keep a business running; they were usually extremely poor or desperate because they were paid far lower wages than union workers, could not bargain, and were often the targets of violence from union workers themselves
The National Labor Union: an early labor union founded in 1866 that succeeded in convincing the U.S. government to adopt an 8-hour work day for federal employees
yellow-dog contracts: an anti-union tactic used by a business where they force new employees to sign a contract swearing that they will not join a union as a pre-condition of employment
- David T. Burbank, Reign of the Rabble: The St. Louis General Strike of 1877 (New York: Kelley, 1966), 11. ↵
- In the Supreme Court of Illinois, Northern Grand Division. March Term, 1887. August Spies, et al. v. The People of the State of Illinois. Abstract of Record. Chicago: Barnard & Gunthorpe. vol. II, p. 129. ↵