The World the Railways Made

by Nicholas Faith

  Not unexpectedly, the railways had their own, highly structured, disciplinary systems. If fines, cautions and reprimands went unheeded, the next inevitable step was dismissal. In Britain five workers out of a hundred were sacked every year, mostly for drink or neglect of duty, though over a tenth of the sackings were due to ‘misconduct and unsubordination’. In the United States discipline centred round ‘trainmen’, the engineers and conductors: one in eight of all the trainmen employed by the Chicago Burlington & Quincy were dismissed. Prussian railway employees were, legally, military reservists. If they struck, an official told Samuel Dunn28 ‘they would be ordered to their colours. They would then be directed to return to their work. If they refused they would be shot for mutiny.’*

  In Japan self-discipline seems to have been the order of the day. A legendary, much-quoted story (which, however, lacks any verifiable source) tells how a Japanese stationmaster felt obliged to commit suicide because the Emperor had been delayed by a signalman at the station for which he was responsible. In Britain, the operating rules of the railways had the force of law once they had been approved by the Board of Trade, whereas in the United States the individual worker enjoyed greater freedom – in theory at least.

  The very idea that the workers were combining together to improve their lot was anathema. In 1866 the general managers of three leading Scottish companies, ‘desirous of meeting the legitimate demands of their employees … will most firmly withstand all dictation by the men’. ‘Dictation’ was firmly defined as ‘combination, or joining any union for the avowed purpose of dictating to their employers’. And that was that.

  In 1871, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants was founded to cater for all grades of railwaymen, although, then as now, British engine drivers remained sturdily independent. The general anti-union bias remained intact. In the 1890s one British general manager remarked how ‘you might as well have a trades union or an “Amalgamated Society” in the army … as have it on the railways’. In Russia, as one pamphleteer put it, ‘In the railroad world, the director is Tsar and God’, and behaved appropriately. When the train greasemen petitioned a director for redress of their grievances he said simply, ‘Do greasemen have rights? What kind of rights could they have?’

  Calling in the US Marshals to end the 1886 Great Railroad strike American-style

  The tradition of militancy was established early. In 1832 the enginemen on the Stockton & Darlington had forced their employers to agree that they should complete only one round trip every day. But until the 1870s the bosses remained on top. There were only eleven recorded strikes in Britain during the first railway generation, mostly caused by companies’ attempts to reduce wages in bad times. One of the few losers was George Hudson, the railway king, who sacked a number of protesting drivers and firemen on Christmas Eve. They were reinstated when their replacements turned out to be both drunk and dangerous.

  Working hours were incredibly long – a petition to the French National Assembly in 1871 revealed that drivers often went for twelve hours without food and worked forty hours at a stretch – hours which naturally contributed to the appalling accident rate. In Latin America, in Meiggs’s day, firemen slept on their engines, helped maintain them, and worked for up to eighteen hours, as did the engineers and conductors, although they ‘came ashore’ in Fawcett’s expressive phrase, every week or so.

  Even before unions had been founded conditions everywhere had slowly improved. At first railwaymen worked a seven-day week, but by the 1870s the norm had become a ten-hour day and a six-day week, a trend led by the enginemen, helped by engineering workers in railway towns. By then two fifths of British railway workers were on duty ten hours or less, though some were still on twelve-hour shifts.

  In France unionism got off to an even slower start than in Britain. Even in the last decades of the nineteenth century the unions concentrated on welfare issues like the provision of sickness benefits, pensions and mortgages. The unions’ impotence was shown when they tried a major strike in 1911, but they, like their brothers in Russia, Britain and the United States, were hampered by the refusal of the status-conscious engine-drivers to unite with lesser breeds.

  Only in the United States and Russia did railway unionism have a broader impact. In 1877 the railwaymen united American capitalism in the face of the first, and thus the most serious, threat it had ever received from an organised body of workers. Twenty-eight years later the Russian railwaymen triggered an abortive revolution.

  In the spring of 1877 the American railroads were in a parlous state. After four years of depression the companies were unable even to agree on pooling arrangements to prop up freight rates. But they could and did agree that wages, already greatly reduced, should be cut by a further ten per cent. They were naturally not prepared for the resulting strike, which affected virtually all the major Eastern lines and cities.

  The strike started in the yards of the Baltimore & Ohio in Buffalo and quickly spread to Chicago, where it was immediately transformed into something like a general strike. In Chicago, as elsewhere, the normal instrument of control, the National Guard, proved useless – since the Civil War it had degenerated into little more than a fancy-dress parading society. The railroad magnates needed more protection directly from the federal government. Although the police killed a score of strikers, several companies of regular soldiers were required to suppress the Chicago disturbances.

  The strikes marked the end of an age of innocence, in which the bosses genuinely believed they were appreciated by their employees. It marked, too, the emergence of the fear of foreign Communism springing from the Paris Commune of 1871, which played a role very similar to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia forty-six years later. The Commune infected railway bosses in Britain as well. That same year three leading Scottish companies, while expressing themselves as ‘desirous of meeting the legitimate demands of their employees they will most firmly withstand agitators influenced by the Parisian Communards’.

  The most popular of the dozen or more novels based on the year’s upheavals was The Bread Winner, a fiercely anti-labour work by John Hay, formerly President Lincoln’s secretary. Another who profited from the situation was Allan Pinkerton, founder of the famous detective agency. Before 1860 he had been the fiercest of anti-slavery radicals, running an ‘underground railroad’ to help fugitive slaves. By the 1870s he was famous as the most ruthless of policemen, employing agents provocateurs against union activists. This fear of foreign agitators was to provide a rich seam for demagogues for generations to come.

  The factual basis for the fears was pretty minimal. In Chicago and in St Louis the 1877 strike was taken over by an allegedly radical group, the Workingmen’s Party, while in San Francisco the workers took the opportunity to stage a race riot against the wretched Chinese. In Gabriel Kolko’s words in Railroads and Regulation: ‘The Great Strike focused attention on … the growth of a working class capable of subverting and destroying by political, or even more direct means, the existing power structure.’

  The strike provided the railway magnates with the shock of their lives. ‘I confess that I felt like a Doctor dealing with a new and unknown malady,’ wrote Charles Eliot Perkins of the Chicago Burlington & Quincy. For the first time (if not for long) they abandoned their own normal internecine warfare to fight the strikers, assuming, as they would for the next generation, that the state would automatically rally to their cause. The strike profoundly affected their previous allegiance to democracy. It would wither, said one commentator, ‘if the thousands who pay taxes get no protection from the millions who govern.’

  The authorities were by no means as virulent as the bosses. Before 1877 state legislators were often hostile to railroads, and executives used to look longingly to the situation in Britain where politicians, it was fondly imagined, were loyal supporters of the railway campanies. By contrast even President Hayes, supposedly the creature of Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, confided in his diary on August 5th, in the mi
dst of the 1877 upheavals: ‘The railroad strikers, as a rule, are good men, sober, intelligent and industrious.’ A few days later he wrote to a friend, ‘If anything can be done to remove the distress which afflicts laborers, and to stimulate enterprise, I am ready and not afraid to do my share towards it.’29

  After the failure of the strikes the workers started to transform their Brotherhoods, previously more akin to friendly societies than unions, into increasingly effective instruments of union power. The bosses had to speed up the formalisation of their management structures because the strikes had revealed the local tyrannies created by many of their far-flung subordinates. After 1877 the more enlightened managers gradually started to negotiate contracts with the Brotherhoods. This normalisation, however, was concealed by the explosive growth of the romantically-named ‘Knights of Labour’, who aimed to transform the railways into cooperatives. But by 1893 their rather muddled idealism had been superseded by a more orthodox, if democratic, American Railway Union, led by the charismatic Eugene Debs.

  In the end hierarchical pride triumphed over worker solidarity. ‘The common experience of being employees failed to dissolve the divisions of skill and status that materialized among railwaymen,’ wrote Walter Licht. The brotherhoods stayed aloof when the Pullman workers started a major strike in 1894. Like many such spontaneous uprisings it was doomed, for it was ill-planned, fragmented, faced with overwhelming governmental force.

  In the short term the ARU was destroyed by the Pullman strike and Debs was transformed into a major Socialist hero, while thousands of workers were black-listed.* In the long term the strike marked the final triumph of the brotherhoods, craft unions whose interests were – and are – narrowly confined to the protection of one particular class of worker. Even today American railway managers have to deal with eleven brotherhoods, and they have greatly impeded the efforts of railroad management to run their systems economically.

  In the United States the revolutionary menace existed mainly in the fevered minds of the bosses. Even in Russia in 1905 it was slow to emerge. Previously only two strikes there had had anything like even partial success. But early in 1905 strikes broke out all over Russia – with the provinces as militant or more so, than Moscow and St Petersburg. Moreover, the protest involved white-collar workers previously thought of as loyal. ‘Nevertheless the demands of January and February’, wrote Henry Reichman, ‘were with few exceptions still explicitly economic and professional’30 – higher wages, shorter hours, pensions and other fringe benefits. Initially even the Bolsheviks were sceptical, distrusting amorphous strike movements.

  However, in the course of the year the strikers, loosely grouped in a single, quarrelsome, under-organised union, began looking to political solutions, a constitution, freedom – though, even then, political agitators found that the mass of unskilled railwaymen were still more interested in direct benefits than vague political ideas. Indeed, ‘Some railwaymen sought in different ways to preserve or restore the status that railroading had seemed to enjoy in the 19th century,’ while others sought support from other industrial groups.

  In the end the Tsar did concede a few of the railwaymen’s demands, but only under duress and only until he had rallied the forces required to suppress them – as he did with the help of two military trains which moved in opposite directions along the Trans-Siberian, crushing strikers along the way.

  After 1905 the Bolsheviks lost their influence in the Railwaymen’s Union, which by 1917 was powerful enough to pose a serious problem. The railwaymen took the idea of giving power to the workers altogether too seriously for Lenin’s liking and it took him nearly two years to impose his will. Railwaymen have always remained a potentially subversive force in centralised Communist societies – during the Cultural Revolution in China they formed a sort of bush telegraph at a time when no real news was available to anyone in the country.

  Some of the ‘revolutionaries’ in the United States were not railwaymen, they were hoboes, many of whom used to carry cards proclaiming their membership of the IWW, the much-feared revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World, the ‘Wobblies’. As such they felt entitled to lenient treatment by their fellow proletarians, the trainmen. The civil police were not too bothered about them, merely requiring them to leave town on the next train, which is precisely what most of them wanted to do anyway. The railroad police (‘bulls’) were more brutal, beating them up and firing warning shots, which often hit home.

  There was a whole hierarchy of illegal passengers. ‘Hoboes worked and wandered, tramps dreamt and wandered and as for the bums, well, they just drank and wandered’.31 They had in common their sadness, their poverty, lives which were squalid in reality and hopelessly romanticised in myth and legend. They multiplied with the trains – in times of depression up to a million rode the rails annually. The tycoons naturally fought against them. Jay Gould went so far as to remove the platforms from the mail and baggage cars of the Missouri Pacific, thus removing a comfortable means of transport for hoboes – and providing the opportunity for another song:

  Old Jay Gould said, before he died:

  I’ll fix the blind so the ’boes can’t ride.

  If they ride, they will ride a rod,

  And place their life in the hands of God.

  An Extraordinary General Manager

  A number of relatively humble American railwaymen left detailed accounts of their lives, but the most extraordinary is The General Manager’s Story, written by a man calling himself ‘Herbert Hamblen’. I am not sure who he was and whether he is recounting his own experiences or blending stories he had picked over a lifetime. He provides a bleak picture of capitalist oppression, yet it is also infused with a uniquely American optimism, a feeling that the best man will win in the end and that every railroad worker, however humble, has the general manager’s baton in his pocket: ‘the general manager, if not the president, started in just where he is now’ – a humble railroad employee.

  Hamblen was a rail-struck lad. ‘The sound of the switch engines as they puffed to and fro, and the bang and rattle of the cars as they were rammed together, was music to me, and served to strengthen my resolution to become a railroad man.’ He soon learnt the grim reality. His story is of chaos, of appalling overwork, of periods of 52 hours on duty, of repeated, systematic exploitation and injustice, and, above all, of accidents. On almost his first day at work he met an old fellow who

  had only one eye, and a terrible scar ran diagonally across his face from eyebrow to chin. This had crushed and distorted his nose, drawn one corner of his eye down, and the opposite corner of his mouth up, thereby showing a couple of filthy, tobacco-stained tusks, and giving him the most repulsive appearance of any human being I ever saw … His overalls were black with dirt, and so shiny with grease that when the sun shone on him he glistened like a crow. His left arm was cut off just below the elbow, and finished out with a three-pronged iron hook, in which he carried a great iron pail filled with colored cotton waste soaked in oil.

  One worker ‘believed that accidents were largely due to the recklessness of the men themselves … he hoped to escape the almost universal fate by being careful. Poor fellow! He was blown from the top of his train a few months afterwards, and found by the section gang, frozen stiff.’

  Another victim of ‘the insatiate maw of the railway’ had been impaled on the drawhead of a car. ‘He was a poor man with the usual poor man’s blessing, a large family, so we made up a purse to bury him, and the company gave his wife and two oldest children employment in the car-cleaning gang.’

  The stars in Hamblen’s story are not the managers, for they were too remote, but the engineers. They were expected to display ‘instant judgment’ and even to wreck their engines ‘to avoid greater damage’.

  ‘He is expected to have and to exercise better judgment than the other employees; and as they have no orders to submit to his will, friction arises, he is d … d for a crank, and when an accident occurs conductors, brakemen and switchme
n all unite to swear the blame on the unfortunate engineer, who, being in the minority, is lucky indeed if he escape discharge.’

  In one case the engineer ‘was sacrificed to save the despatcher, who was a son-in-law of the president of the road’.

  Hamblen soon learnt that ‘every day that he remains in the company’s employ he is one day nearer to a better job; for promotion is the rule on all railroads … if he is discharged, he becomes almost absolutely ineligible in the railroad business … the average railroader had never known anything but railroading.’ Anyone who complained was automatically branded as an agitator. Hamblen himself was sacked because he wouldn’t perjure himself to help the railroad escape responsibility for a crash – although in the event the railroad could not pin the blame on the train crew, and it was bankrupted by the resulting law suits.

  Following a strike, when Hamblen and his colleagues knew ‘the vicinity of Chicago would be anything but a sanitorium for us for a long time to come’, they went on the run, were flung in jail for ten days, started as labourers on a new line, and were gulled out of their money by a crooked contractor, before being rescued by a kindly old general manager who had rescued him once before. Then the manager himself was expelled as a result of a ‘stock jobbing scheme inaugurated by the eastern syndicate which had secured control’ – and who had incited the strike and thus wrecked the road.

  On one road a new management, installed because dividends had been unsatisfactory, instituted a policy of systematic meanness. Workshop crews were put on short time, with a consequent lack of engines, ‘brake-shoes were never renewed while a vestige remained, several wrecks were caused by inability to stop trains … cheap oil that would not lubricate cut out journals and crankpins … waste was no longer issued, so that the engines became coated with grease and dirt, making it next to impossible to detect a fracture in any of the parts … the quality of the fuel became so depreciated that it was impossible to make time, the first result of which was that the engineers and firemen were suspended, and the result, that business fell off, for people would neither ship their goods nor travel on a road where the service was so unreliable.’