The settlement was initially viewed as a massive victory for the Knights of Labor and a crushing defeat for the formerly indomitable Jay Gould. “No such victory has ever before been secured in this or any other country,” declared the St. Louis Chronicle.
The settlement coincided with a remarkable surge in Knights of Labor membership, which grew to seven hundred thousand from one hundred thousand in a single year. The timing of the surge has tempted historians to attribute it to the Knights’ victory over Gould, but that is to give the settlement far more credit than the Knights themselves gave it at the time. In fact, Powderly was deeply concerned that membership among railroad workers generally and Gould system employees in particular was too meager. Although an estimated forty-eight thousand Gould workers were eligible to become members of the Knights of Labor, only three thousand had actually joined. Powderly judged this to be an “alarming fact” not merely because of the sparseness of recruits, but because the new members were mostly “raw recruits who were unacquainted with the aims and objects of the Knights of Labor.” Powderly’s fear was that the newcomers, having been led to believe that the order was bent on direct confrontation with the railroads, would be easily manipulated into voting to strike at an inopportune moment. He was soon proven right.
Powderly attributed the membership surge to two alternative factors. One was an increased interest among all working people in the eight-hour workday, the Knights’ keystone goal. The second was the “sensational” popular press. Powderly pointed specifically to an article in the New York Sun in the fall of 1885 that identified the Knights’ leaders as “five men in this country [who] control the chief interests of five hundred thousand workingmen. . . . They can array labor against capital, putting labor on the offensive or the defensive, for quiet and stubborn self-protection, or for angry, organized assault, as they will.”
The article did “incalculable mischief,” Powderly complained. “The organization began to boom, but those who sought its shelter were led to believe that they could secure the cooperation of the ‘500,000 workingmen’ in the shutting off of the railroads.”
As time passed, the 1885 settlement showed itself to be not quite the victory for the Knights that it had seemed at first. The Knights had obtained from Gould merely an expression of nondiscrimination and the promised reinstatement of fired members, without a firm deadline or any mechanism for enforcement. They had failed to obtain formal recognition of the union or the right to collective bargaining. On the other side of the ledger, Gould, who had been unprepared to sustain a long strike, managed to avert one via the settlement without giving away anything of value in return. He would be better prepared for the next strike. As things would turn out, the Knights’ dubious victory of 1885 would set the stage for its profound defeat only a year later, followed in short order by its utter destruction.
* * *
THE FIRING OF Charles Hall upon his return from a Knights of Labor meeting put the capstone on nearly a year of indignities Gould had inflicted on his workers since the 1885 Wabash settlement. From the workers’ standpoint, Gould had reneged on every provision of the deal. Despite promising to treat members of the Knights without discrimination, the railroad had rehired only about one-fifth of the Knights-affiliated strikers. Wages had not been restored to pre-strike levels and every excuse had been offered for denying the men overtime pay. The Gould railroads never gave an inch: A brakeman named D. H. Hartley told the congressional panel that overtime had been promised on shifts of twelve hours, but it was refused if the shift ended at even “eleven hours and fifty minutes.”
Complaints poured in to Powderly’s office. Knights official E. G. Pagette recalled that the railroad spurned every attempt to negotiate grievances. “We saw very plainly that inside of another six months they would have the employees of the system back exactly where they were at the time that agreement was entered into,” which was to say as targets of “one of the most notorious starvation cuts that ever wages in the West received.” Members from the shops in Moberly, Missouri, objected that “the settlement so far is no settlement at all.” A member of another Missouri local wrote of the shame he felt walking among his neighbors: “They all give us the Horse Laugh and say we were all dam fools for ever coming out and getting Left that way.”
It was not only the workers who felt the sting of deceit. Father C. F. O’Leary, a thirty-six-year-old Catholic priest in the Missouri railroad town of De Soto, told the congressional investigators that, based on what he heard from the workers, the behavior of the railroads was entirely responsible for the strike. “The whole system of railroad corporations,” he testified, “is begotten in fraud; it is carried on by trickery; and the whole thing is a grievance.” He cited “the rottenness, injustice, and spirit of tyranny that exists on the whole system from Gould down to the lowest officer.”
The rising discontent posed an elemental problem for Grand Master Workman Powderly, given his personal aversion to strikes. He understood the appeal of walkouts, even their romance—in the abstract. He was familiar with the idea embodied in the adage that “the blood of the martyr is the seed of the church”—that “if men and women suffered and starved for sake of a cause in the here and now their sacrifice would rebound to the benefit of posterity.” But he reflected that it never seemed to be the martyrs themselves who spoke so glowingly of the virtues of sacrifice. In the heat of the moment, the strikers overlooked the practical consequences of walking off the job, Powderly observed: “Precious lives were lost in strikes; homes were wrecked and children deprived of education . . . , millions of dollars were lost to labor, and in the main this great waste and loss could have been avoided.”
Powderly wore his own blinders, however. Bookish as he was and diffident toward Gould, he failed to comprehend the true nature of the intensifying conflict between labor and capital, in which his members stood on the front lines. “There are people who say that this struggle is the beginning of the war between capital and labor,” he would write Gould in April 1886, after the great strike had ended with the Knights’ defeat. “That statement is false. This certainly means war; but it is a war between legitimate capital, honest enterprise and honest labor on the one hand, and illegitimate wealth on the other hand.” His attempt to draw a line between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” capital, as if the former were the workers’ ally and only the latter their adversary, would prove hopelessly naive.
As the mood of Gould’s employees darkened, Powderly became especially concerned about the hunger for a walkout evinced by the Knights’ District Assembly 101, which incorporated thirty locals representing Missouri Pacific employees. District Assembly 101, he knew, was utterly unprepared to conduct an extended job action. It was $800 in debt, filled with hotheaded novices, and infiltrated by paid spies who “reported every move to the company.” Among them were not a few agents provocateurs who “were loudest in denunciation of the practices of the railroad officials.” Their activities were among the many indications that Gould was intent on goading the workers to a strike. He almost certainly understood that the Knights were weaker than they seemed, and in any event he had boxed them in by writing into the 1885 settlement the guarantee against sudden strikes.
One Knight took the bait—or at least is blamed for it: Martin Irons. The head of District Assembly 101, Irons would emerge as one of the most enigmatic figures of that year of great upheaval—the one genuine martyr of the conflict, blamed for fomenting the strike in disobedience of Powderly, and worse, for losing the battle. Whether this was truly Martin Irons’s fault has been the subject of historical debate ever since.
What is known is that DA 101 treated Hall’s firing as a direct breach of its employment rights. The assembly collected pledges of support from other regional Knights assemblies, then demanded Hall’s reinstatement. When the railroad refused, the strike was on—called so suddenly that Powderly himself only learned of the walkout the next day, when he was alerted by a telegram from A. L. Hopkins, an
officer of the Missouri Pacific. Hopkins complained that the Knights were violating Powderly’s 1885 agreement “that no strike should be ordered without consultation” with the railroad. Sheepishly, Powderly wired Irons from Philadelphia, where he was presiding over a Knights executive board meeting, with a request for “full particulars” of what had caused the strike. The terse reply came back: “Violation of contract by company.”
The job action by DA 101 placed Powderly in a difficult position. He may have erred in promising the Gould organization that the Knights would consult with it before calling a strike, but promise he did. It was now clear that he had no authority, much less ability, to control his own members. Powderly was correct that the strike was ill-timed, unorganized, and doomed to catastrophic failure—so much so that it could plausibly be said that the canny Gould had deliberately provoked the walkout. The strikers’ gravest miscalculation may have been to presume the support of the skilled locomotive engineers, brakemen, and firemen. These workers, however, typically owed allegiance to their own brotherhoods, not the Knights. This stratification was the product of the railroads’ divergent treatment of skilled and unskilled labor, the former a scarce commodity and the latter—trackmen, cleaners, baggage loaders, and shop engineers—easily replaced. Because the brotherhoods refused to join the strike, the Knights’ ability to bring the lines to a halt was limited—they could stop traffic for a time, but once their members were replaced with strikebreakers, the cars could roll again under the hands of the skilled trainmen.
Increasingly desperate, the strikers resorted to force. They avoided attacks on personnel, but not on equipment. The preferred technique to immobilize freight trains was to “kill” the locomotive, generally by drenching the engine’s furnace with water and removing its steam pipes. The railroads eventually would report that of the 598 engines in service, 434 were disabled this way during the strike.
Through the first several weeks of the walkout, the Missouri Pacific’s general manager, H. M. Hoxie, maintained a strategy of what Taussig labeled “masterly inactivity.” Hoxie knew that, given the Gould system’s low reputation in the Southwest, any steps he took to break the strike would produce a negative public reaction. Beyond a few pro forma attempts to ram trains through the strikers’ blockades, Hoxie allowed traffic to come to a standstill. He calculated that losses from the shutdown would soon be felt by nonstriking workers and the communities the system served, which would turn sentiment against the Knights. He was right.
* * *
IT WAS NOT long before the strike began inflicting real economic pain. With freight trains becalmed, the railroads laid off engineers, conductors, and station agents, turning them into unwilling martyrs to the strikers’ cause. In St. Louis, merchants’ shelves lay bare and brickworks and flour mills were shut down for lack of raw materials and fuel. Pressure to end the strike emerged from meetings on March 24 of merchants’ organizations in St. Louis, which fretted over the prospect that the shutdown of freight service “will force merchants and manufacturers, who have prepared for the spring trade, into bankruptcy and enforce the discharge of large numbers of laborers” and “ruin such farmers as are dependent on prompt transportation of perishable products.” The groups issued a “demand of the strikers to resume work or to keep out of the way and cease intimidating others who may be willing to work.”
Plainly sentiment had shifted against the Knights. The day after the merchants’ meetings, the Missouri Pacific again moved a freight train out of St. Louis. It carried fifty police officers, with an equal number stationed along the tracks. Within days, freight was moving again systemwide.
The strikers chose to view Hoxie, the Missouri’s general manager, as their prime enemy, but the truth was that the person in charge all along was Gould. Early on he had given Hoxie explicit orders by cable: “You shall be fully supported in dealing with the strike. If shop-men at Sedalia, Denison and other places stop work, why not close the shops; and if trains are interfered with . . . suspend the whole pay-roll during the continuance of the strike.”
Gould and Hoxie led the trusting Terence Powderly on a ruthless runaround. On March 27, Powderly sought a personal meeting with Gould, perhaps under the impression that Hoxie, who had refused to meet with the Knights, was exceeding his brief. The conversation lasted several hours, during which Powderly expressed frustration with the intransigence of the local Knights. A sympathetic Gould agreed to wire Hoxie with authorization to reemploy all striking workers, except those who had damaged railroad property. The wire included the line “We see no objection to arbitrating any differences between the employees and the company, past or future.”
To Powderly this was a major concession on arbitration, a goal the Knights had sought from the first. Immediately he wired Irons, “Jay Gould has consented to our proposition for arbitration. . . . Order men to resume work at once.”
But Powderly had been led astray by Gould’s habit of speaking with the vagueness of an oracle, thereby reserving for himself perfect deniability. As soon as Powderly’s cable to Irons was published in the newspapers, Gould pulled the rug out from under his feet. The railroad’s position on arbitration was “unchanged,” he told Powderly. All he had meant was that Hoxie could arbitrate if he wished; but he knew full well that Hoxie would not so wish. In another exchange of cables with Powderly, Gould refused to clarify his position any further.
In the meantime, thanks to Gould’s bait and switch, traffic resumed throughout the Gould system. Irons issued one last broadside against Gould in a fruitless effort to rally the citizenry to the strikers’ cause. Published in the newspapers of April 1, it asserted that Hoxie had broken his word by refusing to meet with the Knights of Labor or recognize any of its members as employees. “In short, after himself and Mr. Gould have conveyed the impression to the world that they are willing to settle, they refuse to settle. . . . How much is long-suffering labor to bear?” The statement cursed Gould for “his policy of duplicity and oppression. . . . If we can not be allowed to return to work the strike must go on.”
But the strike was over, its participants reduced to abject demoralization. Hoxie simply ignored Gould’s purported directive to reemploy strikers regardless of their affiliation with the Knights, presumably with Gould’s assent. The only strikers accepted back to work were those who were unaffiliated with the Knights or agreed to abandon their membership.
Several weeks after the strike’s end, Terence Powderly received an invitation from Jay Gould. One Sunday night the overawed grand master workman sat down with Gould in the same room where they had met before—when Gould had issued the wire that Powderly had innocently misinterpreted as a commitment to arbitration.
Powderly again showed himself to be unsuited to the role of muscular union leader so needed by the labor movement. Instead he was a throwback to the pre–Civil War era of mutual aid and educational brotherhoods. He was “essentially a pedagogue,” the labor historian Norman Ware would conclude damningly, with “no interest in, nor equipment for, the major trade union job of negotiation.”
According to Powderly’s description of the encounter on that April Sunday, Gould caught him off-guard by complaining that the Knights of Labor had described him as a liar and a cheat. “You did me a grave injustice in charging me with these offenses, Mr. Powderly,” Gould said. “I have learned to regard you as an honest man. I don’t mind what Wall Street men say of me, but when you make charges against me it hurts.” He told Powderly that his only ambition was to “build up a railroad system such as the world never saw before” and “to leave it as a heritage to the American people.” He denied that he ever treated his workers in bad faith. “Make inquiries of workingmen, businessmen, and professional men as to our treatment of our workmen,” he said. “See if you don’t find they are as well treated as the employees of any other system.”
Powderly knew he had no reason to trust Gould; after all, he had heard directly from his own members of mistreatment and unfulfilled promises from
Gould’s railroads and had experienced Gould’s duplicity firsthand. Nevertheless he marked Gould’s “earnest, . . . pleasant, exceedingly outspoken” manner on this occasion. He turned away Gould’s offer to provide him with rail transport and stenographers to conduct the inquiry, telling Gould that were it to result in a positive report, “your enemies and mine would say you had bought me up.”
Powderly did conduct his own inquiry, but it was a wan affair. He wrote later that he was “never able to make a thorough investigation,” but did not specify why. He came away convinced, however, that the mistreatment of workers was chiefly the work of division foremen and local bosses engaging in “petty schemes to oppress and humiliate the workers.” He sent a report on his findings to Gould via Sidney Dillon, Gould’s right-hand man, but never received even an acknowledgment in return.
Powderly was solicitous of Jay Gould to the last. He wrote that “watering of stocks, sharp practice in dealing in stocks, and oppression of workingmen and women employed by corporations are wrong,” but “how far Jay Gould entered into such transactions I do not know.” Such practices, after all, were rife among business leaders on Wall Street, and “except in degree, he was no more to blame than they.”
The truth, of course, is that Jay Gould was a master of all the practices Powderly decried, and had invented quite a few of them himself. It is unlikely that any of his managers or their underlings treated their workers in any manner of which Gould did not approve—perhaps tacitly in some cases, but explicitly in others. That Gould managed his far-flung railroad empire via intermediaries was certainly the case, but it could hardly excuse him of the behavior undertaken in his name. Only someone as preternaturally indulgent as Terence Powderly could fail to see that.
Iron Empires Page 15
