Powderly also chipped away at the Knights’ “rigmarole” of secrecy—under Stephens, the name of the organization could not even be written, but was printed as five stars. Once the organization shed those commitments, its membership began to rise—growing to one hundred thousand in 1885 from twenty-eight thousand just five years before.
It was a key moment for labor activism. Laborers, especially railroad workers, were the Americans squeezed most by the depression of the 1870s. From their vantage point, the promise of an egalitarian America had receded as the country prepared to celebrate its 1876 centennial. “Capital has now the same control over us that the aristocracy of England had at the time of the Revolution,” wrote the editors of the National Labor Tribune, a Pittsburgh weekly, in December 1874.
Until the Panic of 1873, plentiful work and rising wages had kept the peace among those who labored on the railroads. But the widening gulf between the comfort of the railroad owners and the despair of the rank and file could not go unaddressed for long. As the railroads worked their way toward a pinnacle of economic influence, the working class became increasingly, and unhappily, aware that this trend was developing at its expense.
For the aftermath of the 1873 panic included stringent wage cuts. The reasons that workers bore the brunt of the economic retrenchment of the era are not hard to discern. Railroad managements faced a pitiless choice between defaulting on their debt payments and reducing expenses, of which the bulk was in wages. But creditors had the power to assume control of a railroad by foreclosure, while workers were insufficiently organized to defend themselves effectively against “long hours, low wages, and arbitrary dismissal.” This was especially true for unskilled workers, given the teeming population of job seekers who could be slotted interchangeably into laborers’ jobs.
A class war loomed. On one side would be workers belonging to some of the earliest labor unions in American history; on the other an ever more powerful cadre of railroad magnates, exemplified for the newly militant laborers by the secretive and manipulative Gould. The relentless economic pressure placed on railroad workers would soon manifest itself in a wave of strikes.
American workers had benefited over the previous decade from an economic surge, but now they were experiencing the anguish of having their gains snatched away. “The power of money has become supreme over everything,” thundered the labor reformist John Swinton during a rally in 1874. “This power must be kept in check; it must be broken, or it will utterly crush the people.”
Worker fury was naturally focused on the capitalists who stood at the apex of the economic pyramid, the leaders of the industry that had most represented the surge in American prosperity, and now would take the blame for its sudden collapse: the railroads.
Although in 1870 nearly half of the male population still consisted of farmers or farm laborers, outside the farm many workers were craftsmen who valued their independence and felt strongly about the principle of “free labor,” which meant the right to negotiate the sale of their skills to employers as equals. The notion of “at-will” employment, which would become a legal millstone around the necks of the laboring class in the 1920s and 1930s, was seen at the time to be a boon to craft workers, for it signified personal ownership of their skills. During the Civil War, advocates of at-will employment and free labor, especially in the North, could point to slavery as a stark counterexample. In fact, the principle of free labor had been an essential part of the Knights’ platform. “The aim of the Knights of Labor—properly understood—is to make each man his own employer,” Powderly had declared.
Yet even before the war, some workers had felt the pressure of an industrial system that made their skills increasingly dispensable. The technological revolution that had begun in textile mills was spreading, bringing with it regimentation on the factory floor and downward pressure on wages.
Then the railroads took this trend to a new level.
The railroads’ expansion showed the necessity of a new model of large-scale industrialization. American railroad workers were the first to be employed by “the big impersonal corporation,” as the business historian Alfred Chandler put it. They were also among the first to be stratified into skilled and unskilled workers, which enabled the railroad bosses to foment internal dissension among the rank and file, and thus limit the appeal of organizing movements. Skilled workers included locomotive engineers, firemen, brakemen, and switchmen, who were relatively difficult to replace. They stood at the crest of the labor structure, at the base of which were easily replaceable maintenance workers and laborers, who faced a greater threat of wage cuts and layoffs and therefore had greater incentive to agitate.
In the first decades after the Civil War, engineers and other skilled workers moved from boomtown to boomtown along with the railroads’ western expansion. The work of these “boomers” was arduous, not infrequently crippling or even lethal, but the pay was good—better than that of most other laborers, and even better than their brethren on the older rail lines of the Northeast. Railroad work was romanticized, bound up with the era’s conception of prideful masculinity. As a veteran boomer named Charles B. George wrote in 1887, “Knowing that amid the darkness of night, the storms of winter, and the war of the elements, hundreds of human beings are to be kept in safety carries with it a peculiar dignity and sense of responsibility that is felt all along the line, from the man at the switch, the man on the locomotive, . . . even to the highest.” The butchery they experienced on the job was also romanticized, notably in ballads such as “The Wreck on the C&O,” which lamented the fate of an engineer who crashed his train while trying to meet a timetable: “Murdered on a railroad line and laid in a lonesome grave.”
It was perhaps natural that the boomers would expect their standing in the railroad communities and their high pay to be permanent. But these conditions would not last. In regions where the railroads commanded monopolies, companies might be able to continue charging rates high enough to maintain good wages for large workforces. Once competing lines appeared and rates fell, however, the old wage scales seemed just a waste of money. When the first waves of layoffs and pay cuts came, the workers’ pain was proportionately sharper.
These changes in railroad employment took place against a greater social convulsion, also a product of railroad expansion. As the missionary and social commentator Josiah Strong observed in 1885, the previously uninhabited prairie crossed by the railroads in the West developed very differently from the territory that comprised the original colonies and their adjacent lands. In those older regions, he wrote, “the farms were first taken, then the town sprung up to supply their wants, and at length the railway connected it with the world, but in the West the order is reversed—first the railroad, then the town, then the farms. Settlement is, consequently, much more rapid, and the city stamps the country, instead of the country’s stamping the city.” America was becoming an urbanized nation, its rural institutions and economics overtaken by people who aquired land and property not for their own sustenance, but for the sake of accumulation, ultimately to use it for the domination of society and their fellow Americans.
Walt Whitman tried to find grounds for optimism in the changing America, but could not keep discouragement from coloring his words. “The final culmination of this vast and varied Republic,” he predicted, “will be the production and perennial establishment of millions of comfortable city homesteads and moderate-sized farms, . . . life in them complete but cheap, within reach of all.” For the moment, however, “exceptional wealth, splendor, countless manufactures, immense capital and capitalists, the five-dollar-a-day hotels well fill’d . . . form, more or less, a sort of anti-democratic disease and monstrosity.”
The political clout of the railroads was demonstrated by the role the Pennsylvania Railroad played in the Compromise of 1877. This was the deal that settled the disputed 1876 presidential election by designating Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as the victor over Democrat Samuel Tilden, who had won a majority o
f the popular vote but fell short in the electoral college by a single vote. The compromise gave the Republicans the White House in return for their commitment to withdraw Union troops from the South, thus ending Reconstruction. But as the historian C. Vann Woodward later argued, the path to compromise was greased by Tom Scott, head of the Pennsylvania, who was anxious to draw the South back into national politics to fulfill his dream of a transcontinental line anchored by his railroad and traversing the defeated region. Scott saw to it that Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation supported the compromise. He kept a close eye on the process, even to the extent of providing Hayes with a private train car to bring him to Washington for his inauguration on March 4. The Pennsylvania’s $22 million in annual profits made it the most powerful corporation in the country. To many labor activists, the deal cemented big business in place as the keystone of the national power structure.
Almost as soon as Hayes took office it seemed as if the ultimate confrontation might be at hand. The era of organized revolt may be said to have started on July 16, 1877, when workers at the shops of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in Martinsburg, West Virginia downed tools to protest the company’s second wage cut in a year, reducing them to a level of income they said would force them to “steal or starve.” Within a week, the strike spread spontaneously to a million railroad workers, in the first labor walkout to unfold on a national scale and the first to provoke government intervention.
The Pennsylvania’s Scott demanded that Governor John Hartranft call out the state militia, with the memorable exhortation to feed the strikers “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.” On July 21 a militia fusillade and bayonet attack killed twenty strikers in Pittsburgh; the surviving workers were provoked to burn thirty-nine buildings and destroy more than thirteen hundred locomotives and railcars. Further attacks occurred in Reading, with twelve deaths, and then spread beyond the state line to Chicago, where the toll was another twenty, and Baltimore, twelve.
To local political leaders, the 1877 strikes presaged more disorder. Some viewed the situation in frankly apocalyptic terms. “It is wrong to call this a strike; it is labor revolution,” declared alarmed editorialists at the Missouri Republican of St. Louis, where a general strike brought the city to a halt on July 22. The New York Herald detected parallels with the Civil War, still sharp in Americans’ memory: “Not since the dark and threatening hours of 1861,” the newspaper fretted, “has the nation been called upon to confront such a grave condition.”
Some detected the dark influence of communism. (Marx and Engels had published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, but it was the establishment of the radical but short-lived Paris Commune in 1871 in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War that had put the word “communism” on the lips of the defenders of capital.) “This enemy of all civilized society touches the railway system, and, as if by magic, twenty thousand miles of rails cease to bear the commerce of a continent, . . . two thousand millions of property are deprived of present value, half a million of workmen spend a week in voluntary or enforced idleness,” wrote William Mason Grosvenor, an editor for the New York Tribune, in a September 1877 article titled “The Communist and the Railway.” “A Republic is government by the many. That form of government will wither and die if the thousands who pay taxes get no protection from the millions who govern.”
Newspapers depicted strikers as disaffected denizens of society’s fringes. According to a compilation by labor historian Samuel Yellen, on July 26 alone the New York Times described participants in various strikes across the country as roughs, hoodlums, rioters, bad characters, thieves, blacklegs, looters, communists, rabble, labor-reform agitators, gangs, tramps, law breakers, ruffians, rapscallions, brigands, robbers, riffraff, felons, and idiots—among other labels.
In the Times’ s view, however, the chief villains were not the strikers themselves, but state and local authorities who allowed them to disturb the peace without pushing back, preferably with military-like violence. The newspaper cursed city officials in Pittsburgh and Buffalo who had placed their cities “in the hands of roaming bands of worthless fellows who should not have been permitted for an hour to go unchecked.” In an observation that would be echoed often over the following decades, the newspaper attributed the timidity of the officials to their dependence on votes from “people who own no property and pay no taxes.”
Goaded by such editorial pressure, the governors of nine states called on President Hayes to send them troops, but after discovering that the two hundred soldiers he had dispatched to Martinsburg at the start of the disorders were reluctant to move into action against workers, Hayes took a more measured stance, relying on punctilious legalism to delay sending more soldiers. He required that the governors provide him with written assertions of striker violence or that federal judges issue suitable orders, and he instructed those troops he did send to restrict themselves to the protection of public buildings, the better to avoid direct physical engagement with any strikers. As it happened, most of the strikes were already playing out by the time the troops appeared, or their arrival alone was sufficient to quell whatever disorders had occurred, without the need for further action.
The 1877 strikes were short and yielded little in the way of concrete improvement in the workers’ lot, but they hinted at labor’s desire to challenge the increasing power of the railroad magnates. Hayes’s demands for written grounds for intervention may have limited the interposing of federal authority, but they had a downside, for they created legal precedents for federal action in future labor disputes. As Gould and the other railroad barons would soon discover, the discontent of railroad labor was a ticking time bomb.
* * *
THE RAIL MILEAGE under Gould’s control expanded from 1,960 in 1884 to more than 8,400 just three years later, mostly through the acquisition of competitors and feeder lines. But Gould’s empire was weaker than it looked; in the words of his biographer Maury Klein, he had made the Missouri Pacific, now the hub of his system, “prosperous and powerful but not secure.”
By 1884, several Gould lines had already been placed in receivership. As usual, the consequences were chiefly borne by the workers. Wage cuts swept through the Gould workforce in 1884 and 1885, but that was not the extent of the imposition. Workers who graduated to journeyman status continued to receive apprentice wages—if they got paid at all, for the time between paydays lengthened from a week to two weeks or a month, and sometimes ceased indefinitely. Work crews were cut to the bone and working conditions became more dangerous as low-paid novices were given assignments that required more experienced men.
“Was it not because there was not work enough to keep you employed the full time?” a trackman named James Barrett was asked during a congressional investigation of the 1886 strike.
“Work enough? Yes, sir,” Barrett replied. “There was work enough for a hundred right along, let alone the six men that was on. They could work twice as many men and have just as much as they could do.”
The shrinking wages and hours reduced families that only recently had enjoyed solid working-class incomes nearly to poverty. A report in 1884 by the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics found that wives in a fourth of railroad workers’ households had been forced to supplement household income “by laundering clothes; selling eggs, chickens, and home-grown vegetables; or taking in boarders.”
In February 1885 workers on the Wabash line, a feeder for Gould’s Missouri Pacific that was among those operating in receivership, were hammered with a 20 percent pay cut. The Wabash workers walked out, and at the sound of the whistle on March 7, some four hundred employees of Missouri Pacific shops in Sedalia, Missouri, downed tools in sympathy. Hundreds more left work at other system shops across Missouri and another thousand in Texas. By the second week of March, forty-five hundred employees of the Gould system had walked off the job.
The strikers reasoned that notwithstanding the Wabash’s receivership, responsibility for its condition belonged
to Jay Gould. “Who put the Wabash in the hands of a receiver?” one striker asked. “Was it them who worked for it, or the man who owned it?” The same sentiment may have contributed to another feature of the strike: the support of the public and the press in an agricultural region that had seen plenty of evidence that Gould and his fellow tycoons had been profiteering at the farmers’ expense. The strikers policed themselves to avoid violence or intimidation, established guard units to protect railroad property, and limited their blockades of traffic to freight, allowing passenger trains to proceed unmolested.
The Knights of Labor played no direct role in organizing and launching the 1885 strike. But many of the shop workers who were most active behind the scenes were Knights. And once the walkout began, the union assumed de facto leadership, dispatching veteran organizer Joseph Buchanan to Missouri with $30,000 to succor the workers and lend them the growing weight of its name. Buchanan would describe the speech he delivered to a gathering of Gould employees in Kansas City, Missouri, as “one of the most eloquent ever made to a band of unorganized strikers—it had $30,000 behind it.”
At the start of the walkout, Gould appeared to be overmatched. His Missouri Pacific sought intervention from Missouri governor John S. Marmaduke, a former Confederate general, but Marmaduke refused—possibly in retaliation for the railroads’ support of his opponent for the Democratic nomination for governor in a previous election. Once it became evident that the state government would remain neutral, Gould withdrew the wage cuts and the men returned to work. Following protracted negotiations during which he met personally with Powderly, Gould consented to a comprehensive settlement in which the Missouri Pacific agreed not to discriminate against members of the Knights and to reinstate workers who had been fired simply for their membership in the order. In return, Powderly agreed not to call any future strike against the railroad until first conferring with the road’s officials. This would turn out to be an unwise concession, for Powderly presumed he could exert more control over the organization’s assemblies—their local divisions—than was possible within the Knights’ loose organizational structure.
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