The total miles of railroad track in the United States increased
from just 23 in 1830 to 35,000 by the end of the Civil War to
a peak of 254,000 in 1916. By the eve of World War I, railroads
employed one out of every 25 American workers. The industry's
growth was accompanied by bitter labor disputes. Many of the nation's
most famous strikes involved the railroads.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the country's first major
rail strike and witnessed the first general strikes in the nation's
history. The strikes and the violence it spawned briefly paralyzed
the country's commerce and led governors in ten states to mobilize
60,000 militia members to reopen rail traffic. The strike would
be broken within a few weeks, but it also helped set the stage
for later violence in the 1880s and 1890s, including the Haymarket
Square bombing in Chicago in 1886, the Homestead Steel Strike
near Pittsburgh in 1892, and the Pullman Strike in 1894 ushered
in the world's first Labor Day parade in 1882.
In 1877, northern railroads, still suffering from the Financial
Panic of 1873, began cutting salaries and wages, prompting strikes
and labor violence with lasting consequences. The Pennsylvania
Railroad, the nation's largest, cut wages by 10 percent and then,
in June, by another 10 percent. Other railroads followed suit.
On July 13, the Baltimore & Ohio line cut the wages of all
employees making more than a dollar a day by 10 percent. It also
slashed the workweek to just two or three days. Forty disgruntled
locomotive firemen walked off the job. By the end of the day,
workers blockaded freight trains near Baltimore and in West Virginia,
allowing only passenger traffic to get through.
Also in July, the Pennsylvania Railroad announced that it would
double the length of all eastbound trains from Pittsburgh with
no increase in the size of their crews. Railroad employees responded
by seizing control of the rail yard switches, blocking the movement
of trains.
Soon, violent strikes broke out in Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas
City, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Governors in Maryland,
Pennsylvania, and West Virginia called out their state militias.
In Baltimore, a 20-year-old volunteer described the scene: "We
met a mob, which blocked the streets, wrote Charles A. Malloy.
"They came armed with stones and as soon as we came within
reach they began to throw at us." Fully armed and with bayonets
fixed, the militia fired, killing 10, including a newsboy and
a 16-year-old student. The shootings sparked a rampage. Protesters
burned a switch town, a passenger car, and sent a locomotive crashing
into a side full of freight cars. They also cut fire hoses.
At the height of the melee, 14,000 rioters took to the streets.
Maryland's governor telegraphed President Rutherford Hayes and
asked for troops to protect Baltimore.
"The strike," an anonymous Baltimore merchant wrote,
"is not a revolution of fanatics willing to fight for an
idea. It is a revolt of working men against low prices of labor,
which have not been accomplished with corresponding low prices
of food, clothing and house rent."
In Pittsburgh, where the local militia sympathized with the
rail workers, the governor called in National Guard troops from
Philadelphia. The troops fired into a crowd, killing more than
20 civilians, including women and at least three children. A newspaper
headline read:
Shot in Cold Blood by the Roughs of Philadelphia. The Lexington
of the Labor Conflict at Hand. The Slaughter of Innocents.
An angry crowd forced the Philadelphia troops to retreat to
a roundhouse in the railroad complex, and set engines, buildings,
and equipment ablaze. Fires raced through parts of the city, destroying
39 buildings, 104 engines, 46 passenger cars, and over 1,200 freight
cars. The Pennsylvania Railroad claimed losses of more than $4
million in Pittsburgh.
When the National Guard was at last able to evacuate the roundhouse,
it was harassed by strikers and rioters. A legislative report
said that the National Guard forces "were fired at from second
floor windows, from the corners of the streets...they were also
fired at from a police station, where eight or ten policemen were
in uniform." Militia and federal troops opened the railroad
in Pittsburgh and Reading, Pa. was occupied by U.S. Army troops.
It appears that some 40 people were killed in the violence
in Pittsburgh. Across the country more than a hundred died, including
eleven in Baltimore and a dozen in Reading, Pa. By the end of
July, most strike activity was over. But labor strikes in the
rail yards recurred from 1884 to 1886 and from 1888 to 1889 and
again in 1894.
Native-born Americans tended to blame the labor violence on
foreign agitators. "It was evident," said the Annals
of the Great Strikes in the United States, published in 1877,
"that there were agencies at work outside the workingmen's
strike. The people engaged in these riots were not railroad strikers.
The Internationalists had something to do with creating scenes
of bloodshed.... The scenes...in the city of Baltimore were not
unlike those which characterized the events in the city of Paris
during the reign of the Commune in 1870."
