The Great Strike of 1877 was a series of spontaneous railroad strikes between July 16 and August 5 that collectively involved the largest number of people in a labor conflict in the 19th century. Four years of layoffs and wage reductions as high as 35 percent had angered railroad workers. The workers’ frustration slowly boiled over when the major
Engravings of the Great Strike of 1877 (Library of Congress)
Eastern RAILROADS announced another round of wage cuts during the early summer of 1877.
On July 16 a small group of workers on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) refused to move trains at Camden Junction, Maryland. Local authorities dispersed the strikers and restored traffic on the line. Two days later, however, B&O trainmen at Martinsburg, West Virginia, refused to work. Finding local authorities unable or unwilling to end the strike, management asked Governor Henry M. Mathews to send in state troops to suppress the crowd. Discovering the militia ineffective, the company persuaded Mathews to request federal troops. With some misgiving President Rutherford B. Hayes accepted the governor’s definition of the strike as a domestic insurrection and sent in the army to keep the peace. But by this time the strike was spreading throughout the country, stopping the flow of railroad traffic at Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and many smaller cities.
Violence also escalated as unemployed men and boys joined the strikers and rioters. In Pittsburgh, for example, local elements of the state militia would not prevent the mob from looting and burning the property of the hated Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR). Authorities then ordered in the militia from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh’s eastern rival. Crowds stoned the troops’ train as it traveled westward. At Pittsburgh the Philadelphians fired into the crowd, killing 26 people. The angry mob forced the troopers into a roundhouse, set it on fire, and drove them out of town. In Reading, Pennsylvania, one militia company threatened to fire into another if it continued to harass strikers. Small detachments of federal troops were dispatched to Pittsburgh and elsewhere to restore order. Universally respected, the U. S. Army neither fired any shots at rioters nor were they fired upon. By August 5 most strikes were over.
The Great Strike was a traumatic experience for the American public. It was a spontaneous upheaval that smacked of European-style class warfare. Together with the recent Molly Maguires episode, the Great Strike justified for some the notion that labor protest was sinister and un-American. As a result, states built armories in their industrial centers, and some enacted conspiracy laws that could be used against labor. But the Great Strike also made the public aware of the real grievances railroad workers had against management. The New York Times recognized that “beneath the vicious elements which produced the riots, the country traces evidence of hardship, of suffering, of destitution to an extent for which it was unprepared.” Indeed, even railroad managers conceded that the cut in pay was more costly than an increase would have been and began restoring the wage cuts that caused the strike.
Although Hayes has been accused of breaking the Great Strike, he did not. He sent in troops only when properly requested by state and local officials, ordering them to protect government and private property and not “to quell the strikers or run the trains” and refusing the demands of Thomas A. Scott of the PRR to use the pretext of obstruction of the mails for intervention, a tactic adopted by President Grover Cleveland in the 1894 Pullman Strike. Hayes, however, did enforce injunctions issued by federal courts acting as receivers for bankrupt railroads. After the Pullman Strike, the injunction was also used to protect solvent corporations and would become a powerful tool to break strikes.
Government action during the strike temporarily thrust labor into politics. In New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, Workingmen’s Parties attracted a significant number of votes during the fall elections. In 1878 some labor leaders attended the founding convention of the Greenback-Labor Party, which enjoyed some success that year. But despite the name, it appealed primarily to farmers and not to workingmen.
Further reading: Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1959); Gerald G. Eggert, Railroad Labor Disputes: The Beginnings of Federal Strike Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967).
—Harold W. Aurand
World History
