Anniversary of the Great Railway Strike of 1877

Samuel Jones Tilden - 25th Governor of New York
Samuel Jones Tilden - 25th Governor of New York
FEBRUARY 21, 2012 12:45PM

The Great Worker Revolt of 1877

Salon, Toritto's Blog:  1877 Worker's Revolt

 

Not  too many folks know much about the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, put down by Federal troops. It’s one of those now obscure labor disputes of ancient times; useless information which bears no resemblance to modern day America.  Certainly nothing mentioned in American History class in high school.

 

Au contraire mon frere!

 

The 1870's were a period of monumental economic turmoil. And it started with a bank failure, railroad and business bankruptcies, a disputed Presidential election, massive unemployment and then the great railroad strike.

 

On September 18, 1873 the nation’s largest investment banking firm, Jay Cooke and Company collapsed.

 

As Cooke was the country’s top investment banker, the principal backer of the Northern Pacific Railroad as well as a prime investor in other railroads, and as the company which had handled most of the government’s Civil War loans, its failure was catastrophic. In response, the economy sputtered and then collapsed.

 

Shortly after Cooke’s demise, the Federal government slashed spending, the New York Stock Exchanged closed for 10 days, credit dried up, foreclosures and factory closings became common. Of the country's 364 railroads, 89 went bankrupt, over 18,000 businesses failed between 1873 and 1875Unemployment reached 14 percent by 1876, while many workers who kept their jobs were employed for a mere six months out of the year. A wage if $1 a day was not uncommon.

 

This economic cataclysm is now blandly referred to as the Panic of 1873.

With the end of the Civil War the country experienced feverish unregulated growth with the government giving massive land grants and loans to railroad companies and speculators all channeled through Jay Cook and Company. Thus, the massive overbuilding of the nation’s railroads, and the overinvestment by bankers of depositors’ funds in the railroads laid the foundation for the Panic and the depression that followed.

 

Sound familiar? Wait. There’s more.

 

The Presidential election of 1876 resulted in a narrow popular vote victory for Sanuel Tilden, the Democrat over the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. While Tilden had an electoral college plurality of 184-165 he did not have a majority as required by the U.S. Constitution. He needed 185 votes,  South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana had sent two sets of electors each. There were deals to be made.

 

The election went to the House which formed a 15 man commision (5 from the House, 5 from the Senate and 5 Justices) to decide the disputed electoral votes.

 

The commission eventually awarded the Presidency to Hayes in return for a commitment to the Southern electors to remove Federal troops from Southern states.  The vote was 185-184 in favor of Hayes.  This was part of a proposal put forth by Thomas A. Scott, Chairman of the Pennsylvania Railroad. More about him later.   The election of Hayes and the withdrawal of Federal troops from the south signaled the imposition of Jim Crow and the beginning of another hundred years of black oppression.

 

The mood of the country grew darker, as the majority who had voted for Tilden felt disenfranchised.

 

The Great Railroad Strike started in Martinsburg, West Virginia on July 14, 1877 in response to two wage cuts in 6 months by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.  Striking workers would not allow any of the stock to roll until this second wage cut was revoked. The Governor sent in state militia units to restore train service, but the soldiers refused to use force against the strikers and the governor called for federal troops.

 

The strike spead to Maryland. When the Governor called out the Guard, citizens in Baltimore attacked them in the streets as they marched to Camden Yards to put down the strike. The Guard fired on the crowds, killing ten and wounding 25. The mob burned the station, destroyed rolling stock and damaged engines. The President sent the Marines to Baltimore to restore order. (The Orioles baseball stadium stands on the site - Camden Yards)

 

The strike then spread to Pittsburgh where on July 21, state militia bayoneted strikers, killing 20 and wounding 29 others.

The Pennsylvania Railroad Machine Shop - Pittsburgh
The Pennsylvania Railroad Machine Shop - Pittsburgh

Thomas A. Scott, Chairman of the Pennsylvania Rail Road, often considered one of the first robber barons. suggested that the strikers should be given "a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread."

The burning of Union Station - Pittsburgh (from Harpers Magazine)
The burning of Union Station - Pittsburgh (from Harpers Magazine)

Rather than quell the uprising however, this action  infuriated the strikers who then forced the militiamen to take refuge in a railroad roundhouse and tset fires that razed 39 buildings and destroyed 104 locomotives and over twelve hundred freight and passenger cars.

 

On July 22, the militiamen mounted an assault on the strikers, shooting their way out of the roundhouse and killing 20 more people on their way out of the city. After over a month of constant rioting and bloodshed, President Hayes sent in federal troops to end the strikes.

 

The strike’s fury spread to Reading Pennsylvania where 16 strikers were shot by the state militia. The citizenry destroyed the Reading bridge, the railroad’s only link to the West to stop the militia from proceeding to Pittsburgh.

 

On July 24 rail traffic in East St. Louis and Chicago was paralyzed by strikers as coal miners went out on strike in sympathy. The Mayor of Chicago called for 5,000 vigilantes to help restore order and shortly after Federal troops arrived.

 

On July 25, violence between police and the mob erupted with events reaching a peak the following day. These blood-soaked confrontations between police and enraged strikers occurred at the Halsted Street viaduct and on Canal Street. The headline of the Chicago Sun Times screamed, "Terrors Reign, The Streets of Chicago Given Over to Howling Mobs of Thieves and Cutthroats.".

 

Order was finally restored, with the deaths of nearly 20 men and boys, the wounding of scores more, and the loss of property valued in the millions of dollars.

 

On July 25, 1000 men and boys, many of them coal miners, marched to the Reading Railroad Depot in Shamokin, Pennsylvania. They looted the depot when the town announced it would only pay them $1/day for emergency public employment. The mayor, who owned coal mines, formed a vigilante group that killed 2 out of 14 civilian shooting casualties.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began to lose momentum when President Hayes sent federal troops from city to city. These troops suppressed strike after strike, until at last, approximately 45 days after it had started, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was over.

 

Who got blamed for the strike?  The Illinois Governor  blamed the "vagrant and willfully idle".

 

Others, like the editors of the New York World blamed "the hands of men dominated by the devilish spirit of communism".    Socialists.  Immigrants.

In the 1876 election deal, Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, whose mediation plan delivered the disputed electoral votes to Hayes got a federal bailout of  the Texas and Pacific railroad in which he owned a large stake. While it is not clear if this deal led to the’ sending of federal troops to the strike-torn areas, the possibility of a quid pro quo arrangement is reasonable.

 

In the years that followed workers learned they had to organize into unions to obtain rights and work for labor legislation. The railroad workers had no union in 1877 - and they were shot down in the streets by their own government.

 

Meanwhile in Newport, Rhode Island the Vanderbilts of the New York Central Railroad dynasty would be building Summer cottages within 15 years . The Breakers and Marble House would be the scene of many afabulous social season.

Write a comment

Comments: 2
  • #1

    Chanel iPhone 6 Plus Cases (Friday, 22 May 2015 03:46)

    Although fans were not particularly delighted with the HTC One M8 camera, they did not mind it that much and the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer fixed it all up once they launched the HTC One M9.

  • #2

    Michael Kors iPhone 6S Case (Tuesday, 29 September 2015 10:18)

    Both devices have been given the full-dunk treatment by YouTube user Zach Straley. Straley has posted two videos online -- the first showing the phones being submerged in water for an hour each, the second demonstrating how the devices were faring 24 hours later.

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

 

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

 

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

 

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

 

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

 

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

 

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

 

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

 

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

 

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

 

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

 

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

 

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

 

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

 

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

 

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

 

________________________________

 

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

 

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

1 Comments

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

Read More 0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

Read More 1 Comments