Railroad Strike of 1877

RAILROAD STRIKE OF 1877. Also known as the Great Uprising of 1877 and the Great Strike of 1877, the railroad strike quickly escalated into a general rebellion against Gilded Age conditions. The first national strike wave with wide socialist participation, and the only occasion for a revolutionary municipal commune-style government, the 1877 “reign of the rabble” invited comparisons with the Paris Commune, still fresh in the public mind. By and large, it found socialists too few in number and too little integrated into US working-class life for a major, sustained reorientation. Excluding the Civil War itself, however, it was the largest insurrection in American national history. It was also the biggest instance of labor violence anywhere during the hundred years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the beginning of the Great War in 1914.

Throughout the bitter depression of the 1870s, drastic reductions in wages set off local labor insurgencies, frequently supported by the community at large and particularly directed at unpopular railroad giants such as Jay Gould. Armies of unemployed rose to perhaps 5 million, with soup kitchens providing a minimal sustenance in major cities. Unions, drastically reduced in strength, played no major role in rallying the discontented. Instead, the more or less spontaneous actions protesting repeated wage cuts—first of all in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 17, then spreading to Baltimore and Pittsburgh by July 20—prompted committees of railroad workers to coordinate public response across many cities.

In Baltimore and in Pittsburgh, local crowds rioted against the railroad barons by burning freight yards and seizing food and other commerce off the boxcars. In New York, Chicago, and in many other places, strikes spread from trade to trade, encompassing the labor organizations that existed. From railroad line to railroad line, as far west as San Francisco and neglecting only much of New England and the South, the action spread. Socialists provided public oratory, printed strike literature (more in German than in English), gathered the meager financial aid available, and urged strikers to draw the logical conclusions to their instinctive actions.

For two weeks after the burning of Pittsburgh, warfare convulsed America. A general strike closed down St Louis. The Workingmen’s Party, first US socialist party, briefly took charge of the city, while the local sheriff made plans to raise an army of 5,000 men to fight them. A huge private army of wealthy citizens led by two Civil War generals, one Union and one Confederate, eventually broke the city’s general strike.

In Chicago bloody street battles between the police and striking workers left thirty workers dead, many more wounded. The National Guard killed another ten striking workers in Reading, Pennsylvania. Fighting spread from small towns like Altoona, Johnstown, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Buffalo, New York. In New York City police attacked and bloodily dispersed 20,000 New Yorkers meeting to support the workers.

But wealthy vigilantes, police forces, and National Guard units could not suppress the workers’ rebellion everywhere. Panicked governors and local officials called upon President Rutherford B. Hayes to quell the rebellion with federal troops. In response, President Hayes issued a proclamation of emergency and insurrection, after which he ordered US Army troops to occupy major cities. It was the first significant use of the Army to break a strike in American history.

The strike in St Louis and East St Louis followed a complex course. The latter, together with St Louis an important national railroad center, had as its leading official a labor-supported mayor (a former “Forty-Eighter” who had briefly involved himself in revolutionary conspiracy before arriving in the United States and into respectability) determined to keep the peace by turning over the policing of property to the strikers themselves. After a few days, strikers led by young women (possibly members of the Women’s Branch of the Workingmen’s Party, whose existence had been noted some months before) paraded under banners reading “We Want a Peaceful Revolution” and “We Are Not Slaves, Nor Ever Will Be.” No effort was made until the end to challenge their supremacy in the small industrial town.

In St Louis proper, railroad strikers met under the auspices of the local Workingmen’s Party, which included at least one veteran of the First International, a vigorous group of German Americans, and a handful of articulate American-born intellectuals. Spreading from trade to trade, the strike found its coordination at Workingmen’s Party headquarters. Strikers and their sympathizers meanwhile marched by the thousands, convincing many among the wealthy classes that the insurrection had begun.

Socialists, at the head of the strike’s executive committee, declared it to be general in the city. It was described by its outstanding scholar as “one of the first strikes anywhere in the world to paralyze a major industrial city; and without doubt... the first general strike of the modern, industrial labor movement in the United States.” An especially important moment took place when Black deckhands and firemen on steam barges joined the strike; socialists, themselves uneasy about the significance, failed to join hands and make the most of what the New York Sun called a “novel feature of the times.” Nevertheless, that same day, the red flag rose over many spots in the city. And the executive committee de facto replaced the regular political government for several days.

Revolutionary St Louis, in the vacuum of a nation successfully repressing the strike, could not survive politically. Regiments of the US Army, freed by the corrupt “Compromise of 1877” from long-term duty in the South defending Blacks, marched through St Louis and East St Louis, reestablishing bourgeois order. A general arrest of strike leaders followed, notwithstanding a virtual absence of looting or rioting on the lines of Pittsburgh (and notwithstanding frequent journalistic claims of “communist” intent to loot and burn civilization).

In St Louis, as in many other cities with German American blue-collar populations, the next few local elections saw a sharp rise of socialist fortunes and the establishment of an English-language socialist press. Both these successes were short-lived. Of the St Louis Commune’s leaders, one went on to become the most noted analytic popularizer of socialism in the American nineteenth century: Laurence Gronlund, whose Cooperative Commonwealth (1884), with its Fabian-style argument for state socialism, influenced a precocious generation of American-born socialists. Another St Louis leader, Albert Currlin, assumed the editorship of the Chicago Arbeiter-Zeitung after the 1886 arrest of the entire staff.

Previously, the question of slave labor had torn America apart. Now class conflict and incessant small-scale labor wars would tear at the American social fabric for decades to come. The Great Strike of 1877 was, therefore, a major turning point in American history. Americans left the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras behind and henceforth fought over the fate of the United States in a new era of industrial and corporate capitalism.

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Bruce, Robert V. 1877: Year of Violence. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1959.

Burbank, David. Reign of the Rabble: The St. Louis General Strike of 1877. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966.

Davin, Eric Leif. “The Shattered Dream: The Shock of Industrialization and the Crisis of the Free Labor Ideal,” in Edward O. Frantz, Ed. A Companion to the Reconstruction Presidents, 1865-1881. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2014.

Davin, Eric Leif. The Great Strike of 1877. Pittsburgh: DavinBooks, 2018.

Stowell, David O., Ed. The Great Strikes of 1877. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.