Who Showed Up
June 26. Railroad workers across the country stop handling Pullman cars.
June 28. The President signs the law making Labor Day a federal holiday.
July 3. The President sends twelve thousand soldiers to Chicago.
Same man. Same week.
The week
CORE IDEA
Grover Cleveland created the holiday and broke the strike inside seven days. That is not a contradiction anyone had to explain at the time, because by 1894 the country had worked out a reliable method for stopping a strike. It took seventeen years and four tries to build.
FULL STORY
The Labor Day bill had been moving through Congress before the boycott started. It passed and was signed on June 28, 1894, two days after the American Railway Union told its members to refuse any train carrying a Pullman car, and five days before Cleveland ordered the Army into Chicago over the objection of the governor of Illinois. Nobody in Washington treated the two acts as opposites. Honoring workers as a category and defeating them as an organization were separate problems with separate answers.
This hour follows the second problem. Four strikes across seventeen years, with one question asked at each of them. When the work stopped, who showed up.
Martinsburg
The Baltimore and Ohio cut wages ten percent. It was the third cut in three years.
In Martinsburg, West Virginia, the crews stopped the freight trains.
The governor called out the militia. The militia was from Martinsburg.
Three days
CORE IDEA
The first tool a state reached for was its own citizens under arms. In a railroad town, those citizens were the strikers' neighbors and brothers and drinking company. They would not fire. The failure at Martinsburg is the reason everything that follows looks the way it does.
FULL STORY
The Baltimore and Ohio announced a ten percent reduction effective Monday, July 16, 1877. It was the third such cut since the Panic of 1873. Crews at Martinsburg walked off and would not let freight move.
Governor Henry Mathews ordered out the militia company stationed in Martinsburg. Those men had grown up in a railroad town among railroad families. When they were told to clear the tracks, one striker was mortally wounded in an exchange, and after that the company would not press further. Mathews came to Martinsburg himself on July 18. Federal troops arrived on July 19 and the trains moved.
Three days. That is how long it took the United States Army to reach an American labor dispute for the first time. Remember the number. It will change.
It moved the way the trains moved
No union called it. No committee planned it. Nobody voted on it anywhere.
The strike traveled the rail network, and it traveled at the speed of the network.
Nothing coordinated the Great Railroad Strike. It spread because the rails spread, and because a telegraph operator in one yard could tell a yard four hundred miles away what had just happened. The map of the strike is the map of the railroad, which is why the response had to become national too.
Fourteen days
Drag the date. Watch where it goes and who arrives.
FULL STORY
By the end of July more than one hundred thousand workers had joined in, and more than half of the freight on American track had stopped moving. Eleven cities saw serious fighting. Roughly one hundred people were killed, almost all of them civilians shot by militia or soldiers or armed posses. About a thousand people were arrested.
The spread had no author. In St. Louis the stoppage turned into the first general strike in United States history, and for about a week committees of workers ran the city. In San Francisco the Central Pacific cancelled its own ten percent cut to avoid what was coming, and the crowd that gathered turned instead on the city's Chinese residents. In Chicago the mayor swore in five thousand men as unofficial militia. In Scranton a posse of fifty one armed men fired into a crowd and the town went under martial law.
CORE IDEA
The strike had a shape, and the shape was the railroad. The network fills rather than a movement organizing itself from one headquarters.
Pittsburgh
The Pennsylvania Railroad cut ten percent, then ordered double headers. Two engines, twice the cars, the same crew.
A crew's run went from forty six miles to one hundred sixteen.
Pittsburgh's own militia would not move against Pittsburgh. So the state sent militia from Philadelphia.
By the next night, thirty nine buildings and one hundred four locomotives had burned.
The math that started it
Estimates of the property loss ran from two million to five million dollars. No estimate was made of what the ten percent saved.
CORE IDEA
Pittsburgh is where the workaround was invented. Local men would not fire on neighbors, so the state imported men who had no neighbors there. It worked in the narrow sense that the militia fired. It failed in every other sense, because the city then burned for a day and a night.
FULL STORY
The Pennsylvania Railroad had cut wages ten percent effective June 1, 1877, for anyone earning more than a dollar a day. On July 19 the company ordered double headers out of Pittsburgh. One crew would now run two engines and roughly twice the cars, over a run that grew from forty six miles to one hundred sixteen. The pay did not grow.
Crews refused to take the doubled trains out. When the Pittsburgh militia proved useless for the same reason the Martinsburg militia had, the state ordered in the Sixth Division from Philadelphia. Those troops arrived on the afternoon of July 21 with two Gatling guns. Within hours they had fired into a crowd that included women and children. About twenty people were killed that day.
The crowd did not disperse. It grew, took weapons from a nearby armory, and drove the Philadelphia militia into the Pennsylvania Railroad roundhouse, where the soldiers stayed under fire through the night. The militia fought its way out the next morning and left the city. What followed was two days of burning that took thirty nine buildings, one hundred four locomotives, and roughly twelve hundred freight and passenger cars, across nearly two square miles.
The lesson everybody took
The strike ended. Nothing was won.
Employers learned that local force could not be trusted, and that federal force would come if they asked.
Cities built armories in working neighborhoods and kept them stocked.
CORE IDEA
The Great Railroad Strike produced no contract and no law and no union that survived it. What it produced was a method. From 1877 forward, both sides knew that a large strike would end with soldiers, and that the soldiers would not be local.
FULL STORY
Two weeks after the last shots, President Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his diary that the strikes had been put down by force, and asked what the real remedy might be. He described the strikers themselves as good men, and as sober, intelligent, and industrious, which is his phrasing rather than a summary of it. He also set down the principle that governed every case in this episode: a man may refuse to work, but he may not prevent others from working. That sentence, applied through courts, would eventually do more against strikes than any regiment.
The physical response was faster. National Guard armories went up across American cities in the decade after 1877, many of them deliberately sited near working class neighborhoods and built like fortifications. Several are still standing and still in use.
“The strikes have been put down by force; but now for the real remedy.”
“Every man has a right to refuse to work ... but he has no right to prevent others from working.”
Rutherford B. Hayes, diary, August 5, 1877
Eight hours
Between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand workers struck across the country on one day.
They wanted the working day cut to eight hours.
In Chicago, thirty thousand walked out and about eighty thousand marched up Michigan Avenue.
Set the working day
WORK · GETTING THERE AND BACK · SLEEP · MEALS · YOURS
Travel to and from work: 1 hour 20 minutes · Sleep: 7 hours · Meals: 1 hour
The demand was eight hours of work for the pay of ten.
CORE IDEA
Eight hours was not a comfort demand. A ten hour day leaves a person very little outside the building. A twelve hour day leaves almost nothing. A fourteen hour day leaves nothing at all, and the movement said so in exactly those terms. The demand was for eight hours of work at the pay of ten, which is why it was a wage fight and a time fight at once.
FULL STORY
The eight hour movement set a date rather than a target. Labor organizations across the country agreed that on May 1, 1886, the eight hour day would simply begin, and workers whose employers refused would stop. Somewhere between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand workers struck that day nationally. Chicago was the center of it, with thirty to forty thousand out and a march up Michigan Avenue that reached roughly eighty thousand people.
Chicago had a second dispute running underneath the first. The McCormick Harvesting Machine Works had locked out its union workers in February and reopened with replacements under police guard. On May 3, strikers confronted replacement workers leaving the plant at Western and Blue Island Avenues. Police fired into the crowd. Two strikers were killed, and some accounts at the time reported more.
A meeting was called for the next evening to protest the killings.
Haymarket
It rained. The crowd was small and thinning. The mayor stopped by, decided it was peaceful, and went home.
Police advanced to break it up anyway.
Someone threw a dynamite bomb.
The police fired into the dark. Most of the officers who died were hit by police bullets.
CORE IDEA
Seven police officers and at least four civilians died at Haymarket. Only one death is clearly attributable to the bomb. The rest happened in a few seconds of shooting in a dark square where the shooters could not see. That fact is documented, it is uncomfortable, and it is central to everything the courts did next.
FULL STORY
The meeting called for Haymarket Square drew a few hundred to a few thousand people, well short of what organizers hoped. Rain thinned it further. Mayor Carter Harrison came, listened, judged it harmless, and left. Samuel Fielden was finishing the last speech when a police column of roughly one hundred seventy six officers advanced and ordered the meeting to disperse.
At about ten thirty, an unidentified person threw a dynamite bomb into the police ranks. Officer Mathias J. Degan was killed by the blast. The police opened fire immediately into a crowd and a darkness they could not read. Six more officers died over the following days and weeks. The historian Paul Avrich, working through the medical and trial evidence, concluded that most of the police deaths came from police gunfire. At least four civilians were killed and more than seventy were wounded, though the true civilian count was never established because wounded workers avoided hospitals.
No one was ever tried for throwing the bomb. The leading suspect, Rudolph Schnaubelt, was arrested, released, arrested again, released again, and left the country. Nobody has ever established who threw it.
Eight men, one bomb
THE STATE DID NOT CLAIM THEY THREW IT
Eight men were tried. The prosecution never argued that any of them threw the bomb.
It argued that their speeches and their newspapers had caused whoever did.
This is a conspiracy trial. The theory was that words spoken and printed by these eight men had produced the act of an unknown person, and that this made them responsible for a murder none of them was accused of committing. Sort the record by where each man actually was and the sentences stop making sense.
The record
Sort any column. See whether the columns agree.
No one was ever tried for throwing the bomb.
FULL STORY
The trial opened June 21, 1886, before Judge Joseph Gary, with a jury assembled in a way that the defense objected to throughout. On August 20 all eight were convicted. Seven were sentenced to hang. Oscar Neebe received fifteen years.
The prosecution's case was that the defendants had for years advocated armed resistance in print and from platforms, that this advocacy was a conspiracy, and that the unknown bomb thrower had acted as its instrument. Under that theory it did not matter where a defendant was standing on the night of May 4. George Engel was at home playing cards. Louis Lingg was more than a mile away. Michael Schwab was at a different meeting on the other side of the city. Oscar Neebe was not there at all.
CORE IDEA
Sorting by location puts men who were nowhere near Haymarket beside sentences that do not soften. Sorting by sentence gathers the punishments while their locations scatter. The columns refuse to line up.
Governor Oglesby commuted two of the seven death sentences.
Louis Lingg killed himself in his cell that day.
NOVEMBER 11, 1887Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and Engel were hanged.
JUNE 26, 1893Governor Altgeld pardoned the three men still alive and said the trial had been unjust.
CORE IDEA
The pardon cost John Peter Altgeld his political career and it did not undo the wider damage. The Knights of Labor had nothing to do with the bomb, and the Knights of Labor were destroyed by it. Association was enough.
FULL STORY
Governor Richard Oglesby commuted Samuel Fielden and Michael Schwab to life imprisonment on November 10, 1887. That same day Louis Lingg died in his cell. The next morning August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel were hanged in the Cook County jail.
Six years later, Governor John Peter Altgeld reviewed the trial record and issued a full pardon to Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab on June 26, 1893. He did not grant it as mercy. His pardon message argued that the jury had been improperly selected, that the trial judge had been prejudiced, and that the state had never connected the defendants to the bomb. He was destroyed politically for it and lost his next election.
The cost to organized labor came earlier and lasted longer. The Knights of Labor, which had reached roughly seven hundred twenty thousand members in July 1886, was publicly associated with anarchism and violence in the weeks after Haymarket even though it had opposed the eight hour strike leadership and had no connection to the bomb. By 1893 it had about seventy five thousand members.
“The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”
August Spies, November 11, 1887
Fort Frick
The contract ran out June 30. Henry Clay Frick locked the workers out on June 28.
He had already built the fence. Three miles long, twelve feet high, barbed wire on top, rifle ports cut into it.
The workers named it Fort Frick.
Andrew Carnegie was in Scotland.
Homestead is the strike where the force that arrived was not a government at all. It was three hundred armed men delivered under a private contract, paid for by a corporation, with a purchase order behind them.
Who sent them
Open each link.
Every link in this chain is a business decision. None of it required a governor, a judge, or a vote.
FULL STORY
Carnegie Steel's Homestead Works ran on a sliding scale, a wage system that rose and fell with the selling price of steel. Steel had fallen from thirty five dollars a gross ton to twenty two early in 1892, and Frick used that to demand terms amounting to a twenty two percent cut affecting nearly half the union's membership. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers held about eight hundred of the roughly thirty eight hundred workers at the plant, but it set the terms for the whole mill.
Frick did not wait for the contract to expire. He locked the workers out on June 28 and 29. The fence had gone up starting in January, before any negotiation had failed, which tells you how the company expected the year to end.
Andrew Carnegie had spent years publishing his sympathy for organized labor, including a widely read magazine essay defending workers' right to organize. During the lockout he was at a rented estate at Loch Rannoch in Scotland and left every decision to Frick.
CORE IDEA
The armed force at Homestead was procured, not deployed. The chain makes the purchase visible.
Twelve hours on the Monongahela
Three in the morning. Two barges. Three hundred armed men.
The town was awake and waiting. A boy on a horse had ridden ahead of the boats.
The fighting lasted twelve hours.
Seven strikers and three Pinkertons were killed. The Pinkertons surrendered at five in the afternoon.
CORE IDEA
The workers won the battle at the landing and lost everything within six days. A private army can be beaten by a town. A state militia of eight thousand cannot, and the moment the militia arrived the mill reopened with replacement workers under armed guard.
FULL STORY
Watchers on the river had seen the barges coming and a rider had reached Homestead ahead of them. When the Pinkertons tried to put a gangplank down at about three in the morning, several thousand people were on the bank. The shooting started within minutes and continued for roughly twelve hours. Seven strikers and three Pinkertons were killed, with wounded on both sides running into the dozens.
At about five in the afternoon the Pinkertons raised a white flag. Strike leader Hugh O'Donnell guaranteed them safe passage out of town in exchange for surrendering their weapons. Three hundred twenty four of them came ashore and the crowd broke that promise, forcing them through a gauntlet of beatings on the way to the town rink.
Governor Robert Pattison ordered out the state militia on July 10. Roughly eight thousand troops occupied Homestead on July 12 and the plant reopened under their protection with replacement workers. On July 23 Alexander Berkman, an anarchist with no connection to the union or the town, shot and stabbed Henry Clay Frick in his Pittsburgh office. Frick survived and was back at work within a week. Whatever public sympathy the strikers still held did not survive the attempt.
On November 20 the Amalgamated voted one hundred one to ninety one to end the strike. The union had more than twenty four thousand members in 1891. It had about ten thousand by 1894. By 1900 no steel plant in Pennsylvania was organized. Steel would stay that way until 1937.
The arithmetic at Pullman
George Pullman built a town. He owned the houses, the stores, the water, the gas, and the building the church met in.
When orders fell, he cut wages.
He did not cut the rent.
A company town closes the loop. The same company sets the wage and sets the price of everything the wage buys, so a wage cut without a rent cut is not a reduction in pay. It is a transfer.
The same month, the same family
Figures as the Pullman workers stated them to the American Railway Union convention, June 1894.
Wages were cut. Rent was not.
FULL STORY
Pullman built his model town south of Chicago in the 1880s and pointed to it as proof that industry could house its workers decently and profit doing it. The houses had gas and water. The streets were paved. The company also required that rent be current, and rent was deducted before a worker saw the balance of a paycheck.
After the Panic of 1893 orders for sleeping cars collapsed. Pullman cut wages by twenty to thirty percent by the company's own account, and the workers said the reductions ran from thirty to seventy percent depending on the job. Rents and store prices stayed where they were.
In June 1894 a delegation of Pullman workers laid out their situation to the convention of the American Railway Union in Chicago. Their statement was later printed in the federal government's own investigation of the strike.
“We struck at Pullman because we were without hope. We joined the American Railway Union because it gave us a glimmer of hope.”
Statement of the Pullman strikers, June 1894
CORE IDEA
The dispute was never about a single wage number. The company setting the wage and the company setting the rent were the same company.
The piece of paper
Two hundred fifty thousand workers had stopped in twenty seven states.
Two federal judges signed an order.
It did not command the workers. It commanded the union's officers to stop speaking to them.
The Pullman boycott was not beaten by soldiers, even though twelve thousand of them came. It was beaten by an injunction. Eugene Debs went to prison for contempt of court, which meant no jury heard his case and the judge who issued the order decided whether it had been broken.
How a strike of 250,000 was stopped
FULL STORY
The American Railway Union voted at its June 1894 convention to stop handling Pullman cars. Within four days the boycott touched twenty nine railroads. At its height roughly two hundred fifty thousand workers in twenty seven states had stopped.
The union understood the danger of the mail and moved to avoid it. Members were instructed not to interfere with mail trains, and the union offered to move any mail train that did not carry a Pullman car. The railroads refused to run mail without Pullman cars attached. From that point forward, refusing to move a Pullman car was obstruction of the United States mail.
Attorney General Richard Olney had spent his career as a railroad lawyer and still held railroad directorships. He appointed Edwin Walker, also a railroad lawyer, as special federal attorney in Chicago. On July 2, federal judges Peter S. Grosscup and William A. Woods issued an injunction resting on the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Interstate Commerce Act. The order barred the officers of the American Railway Union from compelling or inducing any railroad employee to refuse to perform his duties, and from communicating with members toward that end.
Cleveland sent federal troops into Chicago on July 3 over the strenuous objection of Governor John Peter Altgeld. About twelve thousand soldiers deployed under Brigadier General Nelson Miles. Roughly thirty people were killed in and around Chicago.
Debs was arrested for contempt of court. Not for striking, which was legal. For disobeying the order. Judge Woods sentenced him to six months in December 1894. On May 27, 1895 the Supreme Court upheld the injunction without a single dissent in In re Debs, and Debs went to the county jail at Woodstock, Illinois, that June.
CORE IDEA
The counter is the argument. MEN climbs into five digits while SIGNATURES reaches two, and the paper gains national reach without anyone having to travel to each strike site.
The ladder
In 1877 the state sent men who would not fire on their neighbors.
In 1894 two judges signed a piece of paper that reached a quarter million workers in twenty seven states, and nobody had to leave the courtroom.
Read the four strikes as one sequence and the pattern is not about workers at all. It is about the machinery on the other side getting faster and cheaper and more legal every time it is used.
Who showed up
FULL STORY
Each of these four strikes tested a different instrument. Militia in 1877, and it failed locally before federal troops made it work. Police and a courtroom and a hostile press in 1886, which destroyed an organization that had nothing to do with the bomb. A private army in 1892, which lost the battle at the landing and won anyway once the state militia arrived to hold the mill open. A federal injunction in 1894, which required two signatures and worked in every state at once.
The direction of travel is consistent. Force got further from the scene and closer to the paperwork. The last instrument was the only one that did not require anyone to be present.
CORE IDEA
Reading the same five fields down the ladder turns seventeen years into one record: who came, who signed, who paid, how fast force arrived, and what actually ended the dispute.
Ten words you already met
Every term below appeared in something you just read. Each one names a thing you already watched happen.
| TERM | WHAT IT MEANS | WHERE YOU MET IT |
|---|---|---|
| militia | A state's part time armed force, made up of local citizens, called out by a governor | Martinsburg, where the militia would not fire on its own neighbors |
| martial law | Military authority taking the place of civil government in a place | Scranton, August 1877 |
| lockout | The company closes the workplace to force terms, instead of the workers walking out | Homestead, June 28, 1892, two days before the contract expired |
| Pinkerton | A private detective agency that supplied armed guards to employers under contract | The three hundred men on two barges at three in the morning |
| sliding scale | A wage that rises and falls with the selling price of what the workers make | Homestead, where steel fell from thirty five dollars a ton to twenty two |
| strikebreaker | A worker brought in to do a striking worker's job | The replacement workers who reopened Homestead under militia guard |
| company town | A town where one company owns the housing and the stores | Pullman, where a fifteen dollar house rented for eight next door |
| conspiracy | An agreement to commit an act, where the agreement itself is the crime, whether or not you committed the act | The Haymarket trial, where four defendants were not at Haymarket |
| injunction | A court order telling someone to stop doing something | July 2, 1894 |
| contempt of court | Punishment for disobeying a court order, decided by the judge who issued it, with no jury | Six months for Eugene Debs |
Check what you wrote down
Six statements. Each one is the version people usually leave with. Each one is wrong.
| WHAT PEOPLE USUALLY WRITE | WHAT THE RECORD SAYS | WHERE TO CHECK |
|---|---|---|
| The Haymarket defendants were convicted of throwing a bomb | Nobody was ever tried for throwing it. They were convicted of conspiracy for what they had said and printed | Section 8 |
| Federal troops were first used against strikers at Pullman | July 19, 1877, at Martinsburg. Seventeen years earlier | Sections 2 and 3 |
| The Pinkertons were police | A private detective agency working under contract to Carnegie Steel | Section 10 |
| Debs went to prison for leading a strike | For contempt of court, for disobeying the injunction of July 2. Striking was legal | Section 13 |
| The Homestead workers were all union members | About eight hundred of roughly thirty eight hundred workers at the plant belonged to the union, and that minority set the terms for the mill | Section 10 |
| Labor Day was created to honor the Pullman strikers | Cleveland signed it on June 28, 1894, two days after the boycott began and five days before he sent troops | Sections 1 and 14 |
Source register
- Rutherford B. Hayes, diary entry, August 5, 1877, in Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Vol. III.
- Statement of the Pullman strikers to the American Railway Union convention, June 1894, printed in the United States Strike Commission report.
- August Spies, scaffold statement, November 11, 1887, as inscribed on the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument.
- In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564, decided May 27, 1895.
- Injunction of July 2, 1894, United States Circuit Court, Northern District of Illinois.
- Andrew Carnegie, An Employer's View of the Labor Question, The Forum, 1886.
- Governor John Peter Altgeld, pardon message, June 26, 1893.
- United States Department of Labor; Library of Congress; West Virginia Encyclopedia; Federal Judicial Center; Illinois Labor History Society; National Park Service; Battle of Homestead Foundation; Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy.