Chapter 4
Carnegie’s recipe for steel made the metal’s manufacture sound easier than it was. Carnegie’s genius—for the steel master’s gift was nothing less than that—was his talent for organization. Those chunks of iron ore and coal and limestone and manganese didn’t migrate to Pittsburgh on their own; they were gathered by the legions Carnegie employed for the purpose. He trained his legions; he drilled them; he rewarded those officers and men who performed to his standard and dismissed those who didn’t. Carnegie was no inventor; not a single technique for steelmaking was his original idea. And he was an innovator only in adopting and adapting other men’s discoveries. But he was nonetheless creative, in the way Alexander and Napoleon were creative. They created political empires; Carnegie created a ferrous empire.
Rockefeller’s achievement was comparable. The empire of Standard Oil reflected Rockefeller’s relentless pursuit of efficiency and his ability to motivate those who worked for him to strive as hard as he did. The alchemy of oil was less impressive than that of steel; the kerosene that emerged from Standard’s refineries was more obvious kin to the crude that entered the intake pipes than Carnegie’s gleaming steel rails were to the rusty rock from which they sprang. Yet the magic of Standard’s organization—the transforming power of monopoly—cast even Carnegie’s operation in the shade. Rockefeller’s regiments didn’t march in lockstep; the armies of capitalism appear chaotic by comparison with regular armies. But the efforts of Standard’s constituents meshed in a manner to inspire the envy of the sternest Prussian general. And they crushed the competition with an implacability that would have made Wellington proud.
For such reasons it was the more striking that Carnegie’s recipe for steel included nothing about labor. He didn’t mention the men who dug the iron and coal from the ground and loaded it on the ships and railcars that carried it to Pittsburgh, nor did he acknowledge those who fired the furnaces and poured the molten metal into ingots and operated the rest of the machinery that made his steelworks the most productive in the world. Carnegie’s failure to acknowledge his debt to labor wasn’t unusual for capitalists of his day; indeed, until the 1890s he was considered more aware of his workers and sensitive to their needs than most other employers. On this account it was especially significant that he ignored one of the most portentous aspects of the capitalist revolution of the late nineteenth century: the emergence of an American working class.
Of workers, America had always had many, of course—although never enough to meet the demand for labor. In fact, the historic dearth of labor was perhaps the central feature of the American economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Europe land was scarce but labor plentiful; in America the balance tipped the other way. This explained much of why Americans resorted to slavery (while Europe, for most domestic purposes, did not). It was also why labor was better rewarded in America (except for those slaves) than in Europe, which in turn explained much of the attraction of America to immigrants.
Until the nineteenth century, many laborers could hope to earn and save enough to become their own employers. In the countryside farm laborers could look to buy land; in the cities and towns apprentices and journeymen could anticipate becoming masters. By no means did reality always match the hopes of the laborers, but it did so sufficiently often that little in the way of class consciousness developed among workers. Wage labor was a stop on life’s journey, not life’s destination. Nothing intrinsic or permanent separated those who hired from those who hired out.
Things changed as the country industrialized. Many of the early textile mills favored young women, for whom the water-powered looms and spindles were a prelude to marriage and motherhood; but the heavy lifting in the coal mines and ironworks that characterized the age of steam was done by men who increasingly expected to grow old on the job. This expectation—novel for America—contributed to a sense among workers that they were a class apart from those they worked for.
“THE ENTRANCE TO the mines is from the top of a precipitous hill, which, covered with the black refuse of scores of years, bears the semblance of a mountain of coal dust,” a visitor to the anthracite district of Pennsylvania wrote.
From the doors and open windows of the colliery buildings a great cloud of dust is ever streaming, settling on everything.… The interior of the building is a cloud of hazy blackness, and the black silent men, as they appear and disappear in the dust, seem like so many evil genii floating in the dark storm clouds.
This mine employed three hundred workers.
Each one had his routine to go through, and he went through it just as a steam engine or a clock. And when quitting time came each one went back to his home in the regular groove, just as the steam goes out of the boiler when its work is done, and then dropped off into sleep, his only pleasure. I have seen far more cheerful bodies of men in prison. It may be their black and dreary surroundings; it may be their knowledge of constant and terrible danger; it may be the strain of great physical labor—I know not what it is, but something there is about these mines that wears the life and soul out of the men, leaving only the weary, blackened shell.1
The miners indeed faced danger. In the early days of American steam power, wood and coal competed as fuels for the boilers that produced the steam. Wood had the advantage of being ubiquitous—available, for instance, along the rivers plied by steamboats, which could refuel at their convenience. But wood had the disadvantage of containing less carbon per pound than coal, which had been compressed during eons by the weight of the rocks that overlay it and effected the conversion from dead vegetation to fossil fuel. Thus in any application where fuel had to be transported more than a short distance, coal won out. And the best coal—that with the densest energy—was anthracite, the hard, black, combustible rock found most conspicuously in Schuylkill and neighboring counties in east-central and northeastern Pennsylvania.
The first mines were mere pits, holes sunk where the coal seams came to the surface of the earth. But as the miners dug into the seams, the pits and holes became shafts and tunnels. Miners worked with picks, hammers, and shovels. They broke the rock free from the face of the seam and loaded it into wheelbarrows and buckets, with which they rolled or windlassed the coal to the surface. As the mines developed, narrow-gauge tracks were laid in the drifts—horizontal tunnels—and small railcars of coal were pulled by men or mules.
During the initial decades of mining, till the middle of the nineteenth century, operations tended to be small and relatively inexpensive. Individuals and partnerships could generate the capital to develop the mines, and the mining industry was characterized by hundreds of separate enterprises. But as the easy pickings—those near the surface—were taken, mining grew more difficult, expensive, and exclusive. The first barrier was the water table. As long as they lacked the technology to delve below the natural level of underground water, many miners convinced themselves that the seams ended just below the water table. (This wishful thinking reflected not simply technological incapacity but the prevailing ignorance of how coal was produced in the first place.) But a few bold spirits thought otherwise, and those with access to sufficient capital installed pumps to depress the water table in the vicinity of their shafts. The expense of the pumps culled the ranks of the operators, and the success of the pumps required additional expenditures, to make the most of the seams now rendered accessible. Shafts drove deeper into the earth, and elaborate techniques evolved to scrape as much coal as possible from the seams. Miners excavated large “rooms” from the coal seams, leaving “pillars” of coal to support the roof (and the hundreds of feet of rock and dirt above it). But because the pillars contained marketable material, the miners, on second pass, began to excavate the pillars. This required a careful weighing of costs against benefits: the costs in danger of cave-ins against the benefits of selling more coal. Under the best of circumstances, the technique demanded the expertise of men who had learned to detect the signs of strain in the pillars and the overburden; under the worst, it claimed the lives of men crushed when insufficient pillars collapsed.2
Cave-ins weren’t the only danger. Floods were a constant threat, should the pumps fail or a miner unknowingly break through to an underground stream. Suffocation could come from nonaqueous sources as well. Miners had names for the several gases that crept into mine shafts and displaced the oxygen that kept them alive. “Firedamp” was methane, “stinkdamp” hydrogen sulfide, “blackdamp” carbon dioxide, “whitedamp” carbon monoxide. All could kill, often without warning. Paradoxically, the most dangerous gas was oxygen, which fed the fires that were the greatest hazard of all. The engines that powered the mines ran hot, and sparks could ignite timbers or especially the coal dust that suffused the atmosphere in and around the mines. In 1869 at Avondale in Luzerne County, sparks from a furnace that drove ventilation equipment set the structure on fire. The fire spread to the timbers supporting the equipment, which crashed down the shaft even as it sealed the only exit. In minutes the fire exhausted the oxygen in the mine and spread deadly carbon monoxide among the 110 men trapped below. Everyone died.3
DISASTERS LIKE THAT at Avondale angered mine workers, who blamed the mine owners and operators for failing to provide such elementary safeguards as multiple exits. The anger eventually yielded results, and the Pennsylvania legislature ordered the operators to undertake basic reforms. Yet the order wasn’t always enforced, and in any event the complaints of the workers went deeper than mine safety. As the demands of mining technology grew, and with them the need for larger amounts of capital, the individual operators gave way to large corporations. In some cases these corporations confined themselves to mining, but often their portfolios were more diverse. Carnegie Steel owned coal mines, as did Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. During the 1870s the dominant mining company in the Pennsylvania anthracite district was in fact a railroad, the Philadelphia & Reading. The Reading and its president, Franklin B. Gowen, took the idea that started Jay Gould on the path to the gold conspiracy—that railroads could improve their profits by guaranteeing traffic—and applied it differently. The main commodity the Reading transported was coal; to ensure traffic, the Reading purchased coal mines.4
This served the shareholders of the Reading but placed the mine workers at a serious disadvantage. With the smaller operators, whom they typically knew by name and face, they shared certain interests, including a desire that the local economy thrive. And even where the interests of workers and operators diverged—for example, in negotiations over pay—the workers and small operators discussed their differences across a relatively level bargaining table. The operators couldn’t squeeze the workers without worrying they’d go to work elsewhere. But once the Reading took over in the anthracite district, the workers no longer knew the owners, who lived elsewhere and had little attachment to the coal community per se, and they confronted an effective monopolist who left them nowhere else to work. Moreover, because the resources of the Reading transcended the anthracite region, Gowen could, if necessary, close the mines and starve the workers into submission.
Nor was this the extent of the workers’ disadvantage. Since colonial times Pennsylvania had been a melting pot for immigration, but a pot in which the melting often took several generations. Benjamin Franklin, for one, had railed against the refusal of German immigrants to adopt the language and customs of the English majority (although his dissatisfaction didn’t prevent him from publishing books and magazines in German). The German strain in Pennsylvania persisted into the mid-nineteenth century, when it was complemented by the large immigration from Ireland that followed the failure of the potato harvest for several years in the 1840s. The Irish landed in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia (avoiding the South for its embrace of slavery). They formed urban enclaves but also spread to rural districts that needed unskilled workers. They reached the coalfields of Pennsylvania by the 1850s. Some of their new neighbors—employers, for example, and predecessors from Ireland—were happy to see them. Others—existing mine workers, members of other ethnic groups—were not. Previous immigrants from England and Wales formed the largest group of workers in the mines, and on both cultural and economic grounds they eyed the newcomers with suspicion and dislike. They did what they could to distance themselves from the Irish, who found themselves damned as drunken, ignorant papists. Among the workers a class system developed, distinguishing “miners” from “mine workers.” The former, mostly British, were the men who freed the native coal from the seam face; the latter, mostly Irish, were the ones who broke the freed coal into manageable chunks, which they loaded into cars and transported to the surface. The difference in condition between the two groups was described by a Welshman who, though a miner, sympathized with the Irish mine workers: “The miner and laborer go to work at seven o’clock in the morning and probably the miner will cut enough coal by ten or twelve o’clock. Then he will go out, leaving the poor laborer up to his waist in water and he will have to pile the lumps and fill three or four cars with coal after the gentleman has left.… Between five and six, the laborer, poor thing, arrives home wet as a fish.” For his pains the laborer received about a third the wages of the miner.5
One might have expected the consolidation of the coal industry to force the different groups of employees together. (Technically the miners were not employees but independent contractors. In some cases the mine workers worked for them.) Occasionally it did, but at least equally often it intensified the differences between the groups. Miners, for instance, often blamed accidents on the alleged carelessness of the mine workers. After the Avondale fire, Welsh miners accused Irish workers of deliberately setting the fire to retaliate against perceived injuries from the Welsh. The accusation gained credence from the fact that few Irish were working when the disaster struck, most having taken the day off—ironically, to attend a funeral. Of the 110 victims, only six were Irish.6
For all the disadvantages of labor in the coal industry, management wasn’t without its problems. The Reading was a monopolist in the small world of the coalfields, but it was one road among many in the cutthroat rail industry. And when the Panic of 1873 sent the industry reeling, the Reading was forced to reduce costs wherever it could. The alternative was bankruptcy, which would displease shareholders but devastate employees, including the mining men of the anthracite country.
Yet the cost-reduction plan was painful enough. In the autumn of 1874 the Reading announced wage cuts of up to 20 percent, with additional cuts projected in the event coal prices kept falling. Whether Gowen expected the workers to accept the cuts was open to some doubt. For years the Reading had been battling the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest union in the region; Gowen seems to have been looking for a showdown. If so, he got what he wanted. The WBA rejected management’s terms and called a strike.
The stoppage shut down nearly all production in the anthracite region by January 1875. This timing would have favored the union—demand for coal peaked in winter—had Gowen and the Reading not been stockpiling coal for many months, partly on account of its low price but partly in preparation for a strike. The strike elicited surprising solidarity among the workers, given their ethnic and occupational divisions. The union also enjoyed considerable support among Pennsylvanians at large. This reflected the distrust of corporations in general and railroads in particular that was beginning to characterize large segments of the American population; it also reflected, paradoxically, the success of the Reading’s stockpile strategy, which prevented Pennsylvanians from shivering for lack of fuel.
The workers held out for six months, a long time in the coal industry, where strikes typically lasted no more than weeks. (The 1875 strike would often be called simply the “Long Strike.”) By late spring the lack of wages was telling severely on workers and their families. One union official, later recalling the hardship of this period, testified, “Hundreds of families rose in the morning to breakfast on a crust of bread and a glass of water.… Day after day men, women, and children went to the adjoining woods to dig roots and pick up herbs to keep body and soul together.” Finally most workers gave in, and by the beginning of July nearly all the mines were back in operation, on Gowen’s terms.7
YET THE STRUGGLE hadn’t ended. Among the Irish miners was a mysterious network of radicals calling themselves “Molly Maguires.” Who they were, how many they numbered, and how closely they conspired were questions that exercised the American legal imagination at the time and the American historical imagination afterward. Without doubt the Molly Maguires drew on a tradition of radicalism with roots in the Irish countryside, where secret societies of “Whiteboys,” “Ribbonmen,” and “Molly Maguires” protested evictions and other attacks on the rights and privileges, as the protesters interpreted them, of ordinary folk. The protesters responded with attacks of their own, including arson, assault, and even murder. Because the evictors were often British (or Irish in league with the British) and the protesters Irish, the movement acquired ethnic, cultural, and nationalistic overtones.
The radical tradition crossed the Atlantic with some of the Irish immigrants. In America it lost its nationalistic edge, though some of the anti-British feeling remained, exacerbated by the occupational differences in the coalfields between British and Irish miners. But the primary focus of the radicals was the management of the mines, and beginning in the 1860s foremen, superintendents, and the occasional mine owner fell victim to fatal assault. For years no one knew who the murderers were, or even whether the murders were related. Yet when the period of the Long Strike produced a rash of killings—eight attributed to the Molly Maguires between October 1874 and September 1875—the Pennsylvania authorities and the mine operators made apprehending the killers their first priority.
For help they turned to Allan Pinkerton, a former Chicago police investigator who in the decade after the Civil War transformed an ordinary detective agency into the intelligence arm of capitalist management. The Reading’s Franklin Gowen, writing a retainer check to Pinkerton, told him to go after the Molly Maguires by any means necessary. “What we want, and everybody wants,” he said (by Pinkerton’s later account), “is to get within this apparently impenetrable ring; turn to the light the hidden side of this cruel and dark body.”
Pinkerton accepted the challenge and considered what was required. “It is no ordinary man that I need in this matter,” he explained to Gowen. “He must be an Irishman, and a Catholic, as only this class of persons can find admission to the Mollie Maguires. My detective should become, to all intents and purposes, one of the order, and continue so while he remains in the case before us. He should be hardy, tough, and capable of laboring, in season and out of season, to accomplish, unknown to those about him, a single absorbing object.”8
The agent he assigned to the task was a reasonable approximation to the ideal. James McParlan was a native of Ulster who had worked in a chemical factory and a textile warehouse before emigrating to America just after the Civil War. In 1871 he joined the Pinkerton agency, and two years later Pinkerton put him on the Molly Maguire case. Pinkerton arranged for McParlan to assume the identity of one James McKenna, a drifter who wended his way to the anthracite district. Evidence indicated that Patrick Dormer, a Pottsville innkeeper, might be a Molly, and so McParlan, alias McKenna, made Dormer’s inn a haunt. He treated the house to drinks, which pleased the proprietor as well as the customers, and he let slip that he was on the run from the law for counterfeiting—“shoving the queer,” he called it—and murder. When his new friends insisted, he showed them samples of his handiwork, which looked just like the real money it was. Pinkerton helped McParlan establish credibility by sending around detectives asking about him. McParlan helped his own case by striking up a romance with Mary Ann Higgins, the sister-in-law of another suspected Molly, Jimmy Kerrigan; the wooing gave McParlan an excuse for spending time around the Kerrigan house. Before long he had insinuated himself among what seemed to be the leadership of the secret organization.
Yet the closer he got, the greater the compulsion he felt to join. He accepted initiation into the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Irish fraternal group to which all the Mollies seemed to belong. And he was drawn into planning for some of the attacks on the Reading management. At this point he faced the mole’s dilemma: whether to inform the intended victim and thereby risk being discovered or to keep silent in the interest of the continuing investigation and perhaps let the victim die. By Pinkerton’s account, McParlan sent warning in the case of at least one man targeted for death, who then escaped (temporarily). By his own admission, in another case McParlan failed to give effective warning, and people died.9
Though McParlan thought he knew the men behind some of the murders, he realized there was much he didn’t know. And neither he nor Pinkerton had any confidence that what he did know would stand up in court. The Irish were famously loyal, one to the other, and amid a strike they stuck even closer together. Pinkerton doubted that any jury in the coal country would convict an Irish mine worker for killing a manager, almost regardless of the evidence. Those who didn’t sympathize with the defendants would be intimidated by those who did.
So Pinkerton suggested an application of that standby of frustrated citizens, vigilante action. He circulated a handbill around the coal country. “The followings are the FACTS for the consideration of the Vigilance Committee of the Anthracite Coal Region, and all other good citizens who desire to preserve law and order in their midst,” the handbill began. It proceeded to recount the late murders and attempted murders, and it listed the names of those it said were responsible for the crimes. Some of the men named were under arrest; others were at large. Pinkerton never acknowledged printing the bill, but textual evidence—misspellings consistent with misspellings in agency documents—pointed his way.
Pinkerton had reason to cover any connection to the handbill after masked men burst at night into the Wiggans Patch home of one of those on the list. The homeowner managed to escape, but another of those listed was murdered in the most brutal fashion. More shocking to many was the killing, apparently by mistake in the dark, of the wife of the homeowner.
The Wiggans Patch murders jolted everyone touched by the coalfield violence. The Catholic Church, which till now had equivocated on the Molly Maguires, was forced to take a stand. The local bishop excommunicated the Mollies. “Beware of the Molly Maguires,” his right-hand priest explained. “If you have a brother among them, pray for his repentance but have nothing further to do with him—and remember that he is cut off from the Church.”
Shortly thereafter the trials of three men previously arrested as Mollies began. The prosecution chose to try the cases separately, starting with the least sympathetic suspect. The state summoned 122 witnesses, who built a powerful circumstantial case against Michael Doyle. To the astonishment of nearly all observers, the defense didn’t call a single witness, instead merely pointing out weaknesses in the prosecution’s argument. The jury—which, tellingly, and by the prosecution’s successful design, included no Irish—returned a guilty verdict. Three weeks later the judge sentenced Doyle to be hanged.10
As the prosecution had hoped, this initial verdict prompted reflection in the remaining prisoners. One, Jimmy Kerrigan, the kin of James McParlan’s sweetheart, decided to turn state’s evidence; he implicated several more Mollies, who were arrested shortly.
The trials continued. The second defendant, Edward Kelly, was convicted in April 1876 and sentenced to join Doyle on the scaffold. Jimmy Kerrigan got off in exchange for his testimony, but the prosecution of the other prisoners proceeded. As the evidence against these men was less convincing than that against Doyle and Kelly, the state’s attorneys pressed Pinkerton to make McParlan take the stand. McParlan was predictably unhappy at having to reveal himself; he’d be useless for similar work in his chosen field, assuming he survived the likely assassination attempts by the Mollies or their friends. But McParlan’s identity was leaked to the defense, apparently by a Catholic priest who differed with his bishop on the culpability of the Mollies, and McParlan had no choice but to testify.11
By this time the Molly Maguire prosecution was national news. Correspondents arrived from all over the country to report the trial. McParlan was the star witness for the prosecution, portraying the Mollies as a conspiracy dedicated to ruling the coal country by violence and intimidation. The defense strove to impeach McParlan’s testimony. It portrayed him as an agent provocateur, demanding to know why he hadn’t tried to save the men targeted for death. “Why did you not go over yourself, from Columbia House, five miles to save the life of a man you knew was going to be assassinated?” the defense counsel asked.
“I was afraid of being assassinated myself,” McParlan replied.
“You would not take that risk to save the life of John P. Jones?”
“I would not run the risk of losing my life for all the men in this Court House.”
“You were playing the part of a detective and yet you would not take that much trouble to walk five miles?”
“Walking the five miles was nothing. I would walk twenty.… It was the saving of my own life I was looking to.”12
McParlan’s honesty apparently appealed to the jury, which seemed ready to convict the prisoners until one of jurors fell ill with pneumonia and died. The judge was compelled to declare a mistrial.
In the court of public opinion, however, the Mollies had already been convicted. “When the inner history of the Molly Maguires shall have been written,” the Philadelphia Inquirer predicted, “it will embody the harrowing details of a conspiracy such as the world has rarely known. This history has been making itself through years of lawlessness, bloodshed, plunder and general anarchy.” The Irish terrorists had done their best to blight the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. “What Providence intended for a harvest of peace and plenty, the devilish ingenuity of banded cut-throats turned into a harvest of death and rapine.… Capital was fettered, honest labor held by the throat, and Red-Handed Murderers, Reeking with the blood of their victims, held high carnival over the prostrate form of Justice, blind and bleeding.” The New York Times was slightly less wroth but no less convinced that the guilty must pay: “The Pennsylvania authorities owe it to civilization to extirpate this noxious growth, now that its roots have been discovered.”13
New trials began and continued through the autumn of 1876 and into the new year. Beyond the men charged with murder, many others were prosecuted for conspiracy. Earlier fears of jury intimidation diminished as the jurors delivered one guilty verdict after another. By the beginning of June 1877, ten men had been convicted and sentenced to death for the coalfield murders.
The executions were scheduled for June 21. Six of the condemned would hang at Pottsville, four at Mauch Chunk. The sheriff at Pottsville initially wanted to dispatch all six of his prisoners at once, for maximum exemplary effect, and even had a special scaffold built. But for reasons unclear, he changed his mind and decided to execute them by pairs. Thousands of people gathered about the yard where the execution would take place. Some came for vicarious vindication; others wept for the doomed prisoners. A letter to one of the prisoners, James Roarity, from his father back in Ireland was printed in the local papers:
Dear Loving Son:
I sit to write you the last letter that I’ll ever write.… Don’t be afraid to meet your doom or your Judge. If you are going to suffer innocent, I’m sure God will spare your soul, and it’s far better to suffer in this world than in the world to come.… Before you die, declare to your Judge and to the world whether you are guilty or innocent.… And when your dear wife sees you, and the children, give them good encouragement, and keep yourself up. Certainly we are sorry, but what is the use? I did not tell your mother about it so far.
The first two men carried roses to the scaffold. When the boards swung away beneath their feet and the ropes snapped tight about their necks, the scarlet petals scattered upon the ground. The next two, including James Roarity, proclaimed their innocence as the hangman prepared to repeat his work; then they also had their necks broken by the noose. Thomas Duffy had been kept till the last; the prosecutors apparently had less confidence in his conviction than in the others, and they wanted to leave open the possibility that a scaffold confession by one of the others would clear him. But none of them obliged, and he and the sixth prisoner went to their grim fate, too.
The Mauch Chunk executions were held indoors. The prisoners were manacled and hooded before the nooses were placed around their necks. Attending priests led them in prayer till the last moment, when the floor fell away beneath them all simultaneously. Two had their necks snapped cleanly; the others struggled before falling unconscious and finally strangling.
After the executions the Reading Railroad provided special trains to transport the bodies, packed in ice, to their homes for burial, and to take friends and relatives to the memorial services. The Catholic bishop, having proscribed the Molly Maguires, relented so far as to allow the executed men to be buried in consecrated ground. He wished he hadn’t when the relatives of at least one of the men held a traditional Irish wake, of the pre-Christian sort the Church had been trying to stamp out in the old country for centuries. Far into the night the keening that had sent ancient Gaels into the afterlife drifted down the blackened valleys of the anthracite district.14
“THE STRUGGLE IS OVER,” the Miners’ Journal lamented in the wake of the coalmen’s strike against Franklin Gowen and the Reading. “The war between Capital and Labor is ended, and Labor is not victor. It is not even the drawn battle signified by compromise; it is an unconditional surrender, a capitulation of all the army, and relinquishment of all the claim for which it fought.” A miners’ minstrel put the outcome to verse:
Well, we’ve been beaten, beaten all to smash
And now, sir, we’ve begun to feel the lash,
As wielded by a gigantic corporation,
Which runs the Commonwealth and ruins the nation.15
A few unions, though, lived to fight on. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers represented drivers, brakemen, and other operating personnel on various railroads. The Reading, the Penn, the Erie, and the Baltimore & Ohio, after slashing one another with rate cuts following the Panic of 1873, called a halt to the competition in a series of secret meetings during the spring of 1877. “The great principle on which we all joined to act was to earn more and spend less,” Hugh Jewett of the Erie reported to an approving J. P. Morgan. The greater earnings would come from customers, who would be compelled by the cartel’s new rate structure to pay more; the lesser spending would come from the railroads’ employees, who would be forced to accept pay cuts.16
The engineers on the Reading were the first to respond when the owners announced the cuts. In April 1877 the engineers’ brotherhood called a strike, and half the drivers walked off the job. But Franklin Gowen, flushed with his victory over the miners and the Molly Maguires, quickly struck back. He ordered his managers into the cabs and cabooses and paid bonuses to those regular engineers who stayed at work. When short-staffed trains derailed and wrecked, he blamed the brotherhood for sabotage and persuaded various editors to print his explanation. Within weeks the strike collapsed, breaking the union on the Reading and demoralizing its members elsewhere. The pro-management New York Times applauded the result. “The Brotherhood is destroyed as a dictatorial body,” the paper proclaimed. “Neither railroad nor engineer will fear it henceforth or regard its ukases.”17
Yet the Reading was a small fish in this particular pool. The whale was the Penn, which had outgrown the state of its name to become a transportation empire, with tracks that ran from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from the Great Lakes to the Ohio. Capitalized at nearly $400 million, it was the largest corporation in America. Tom Scott, its president, had won political friends for the line during the Civil War by moving Union troops swiftly and surely; after the war he remembered his friends and they him.
But Scott had to contend with John Rockefeller, who was currently launching his revolution of oil transport. Rockefeller was starting to purchase pipelines; Scott warned him to stick to refining and let the shippers handle the carrying trade. When Rockefeller ignored the warning, Scott fired a larger shot across his bow by having a Penn ally, the Empire Transportation Company, enter the field of refining. This succeeded in getting Rockefeller’s attention. He went straight to Scott and demanded that he desist. The Empire had no business in refining, Rockefeller said. He added that Scott had a choice: immediate withdrawal or industrial war. Scott refused to back down, and America’s biggest railroad and its largest oil company locked in combat. Rockefeller canceled his contracts with the Penn and transferred his business to Scott’s railroad rivals. To help them handle the shipments he placed a rush order for six hundred new tank cars. He closed his refineries in Pittsburgh, a Penn-dominated city, and increased production in Cleveland, controlled by the Penn’s competitors. He undercut the Empire in every market where that company sold kerosene. The effect was dramatic. Between the shrunken traffic and the lost sales, the Penn began hemorrhaging cash. By the beginning of June 1877 it had bled a million dollars.18
Prudence suggested that Scott capitulate, but he was too proud and stubborn. Instead he called a June 4 meeting with a delegation from the engineers’ union. He described the dire condition of the company and explained the need for cost savings. The shareholders had done their part, he said; dividends had been cut 40 percent. It was only fair for the workers to accept a cut. So far the workers had given back a mere 20 percent; surely they could give a bit more. Otherwise they all—Scott included himself here—might be out of jobs.
Scott hadn’t risen to the top of the railroad industry without possessing skills of persuasion, and the workers’ committee left this meeting accepting Scott’s argument, if reluctantly. They managed to get the leaders of most of the local chapters of the union to join them. But longshoremen at the Penn’s docks in New York, suffering from a recent pay cut that put their hourly wage at thirteen and a half cents (down from twenty cents before the cutting began), staged a wildcat strike.
The stoppage didn’t last. Scott offered to restore a half cent to the wage even as he ordered other company workers to fill in for the striking dockers. Between the promise and the threat, the longshoremen felt compelled to take the half penny and return to work.19
Scott’s success inspired other railroads to institute similar cuts and to require workers to sign “yellow dog” contracts banning unions. “I do agree to keep out of all combinations of men encouraging strikes, and in case of strikes or combinations, will work faithfully for the company’s interest,” a typical contract read. But the cuts and the contractual duress caused the resentment against the railroads to fester and grow. Penn workers in Pittsburgh formed a new organization, the Trainmen’s Union, that aimed to unite all railroad workers against the companies. Several hundred men signed up at once, despite infiltration by company spies and orders by company executives to fire any workers who joined the new union.20
At Martinsburg, West Virginia, workers on the Baltimore & Ohio who had recently been recruited to the Trainmen’s Union reacted to the pay cuts by seizing a cattle train, detaching its locomotives, and stranding the cars on the main east-west line. The mayor of Martinsburg called out the police, but the townspeople, who had long chafed at their dependence on the railroad, sided with the workers, hoisting the brakeman who had initiated the stoppage to their shoulders and parading him heroically about the town.
Company officials appealed to the governor of the state, Henry Mathews, for protection of their property. Mathews weighed the votes of the workers and their friends against the money and influence of the railroads and chose the latter. He summoned the militia and ordered it to ensure the safety of the trains and the freedom of commerce. A special train carrying the state troops approached Martinsburg, where it was surrounded by a jeering mob. One of the strikers had thrown a derail switch; as the train slowly approached, an armed soldier leaped down and tried to restore the switch to its safe position. The striker fired a pistol at the soldier, who shot back, hitting the man in the head but miraculously not killing him. Other soldiers, however, opened fire, fatally wounding the striker.
Within minutes reports of the shootings flew east and west along the telegraph wires that flanked the rail line. Governor Mathews grew alarmed and appealed to President Rutherford Hayes for help. “Owing to unlawful combinations and domestic violence now existing at Martinsburg and at other points along the line of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, it is impossible with any force at my command to execute the laws of the State,” Mathews wrote. “I therefore call upon your Excellency for the assistance of the United States military.” The head of the B&O, John Garrett, seconded the appeal. “This great national highway,” Garrett told Hayes, referring to the railroad, “can only be restored for public use by the interposition of the U.S. forces.” Garrett warned that the fate of the nation hung in the balance: “Unless this difficulty is immediately stopped, I apprehend the gravest consequences, not only upon our line, but upon all the lines in the country which, like ourselves, have been obliged to introduce measures of economy in these trying times.”21
Hayes had dealt with the insurrection of the South during the Civil War, when he served as major general in the Union army. After the war, as governor of Ohio, he had deployed his state’s militia to counter a coal miners’ strike there. Now, as leader of the party of business and the recipient of campaign donations from Tom Scott and other railroad executives, he acted with equal decisiveness in ordering federal troops from the arsenal at Washington and from Fort McHenry at Baltimore to Martinsburg.22
The federal force quelled the uprising in West Virginia, which had begun to dissipate on its own. But the troubles leapfrogged the troop train to Baltimore. Maryland’s first city was reeling from the depression; industrial workers, who constituted perhaps a third of the labor force, had suffered job reductions and pay cuts that were, if anything, worse than those afflicting the railroad engineers. “The working people everywhere are with us,” one rail unionist told a reporter. “They know what it is to bring up a family on ninety cents a day, to live on beans and corn meal week in and week out, to run in debt at the stores until you cannot get trusted any longer, to see the wife breaking down under privation and distress, and the children growing sharp and fierce like wolves day after day because they don’t get enough to eat.”
As a result, when Baltimore rail workers struck the B&O in July 1877, a friendly populace applauded them. “There is no disguising the fact that the strikers in all their lawful acts have the fullest sympathy of the community,” the Baltimore Sun reported. Even the unlawful acts evoked substantial support. When the governor summoned the state militia to keep the strikers in line, Baltimore erupted in riot. Workers heaved rocks and bricks at the militiamen, who responded with rifle fire. Members of the crowd—which the vice president of the B&O called “the fiercest mob ever known in Baltimore”—produced firearms of their own, and the streets of the city became shooting galleries. One part of the crowd cornered a regiment of militia in the railroad station while others began destroying rail stock. Three men (or boys: to some witnesses they looked quite young) commandeered a locomotive, built up a full head of steam, opened the throttle, and jumped off to watch with glee as the engine crashed into some railcars before taking out a loading platform, shattering a dispatcher’s office, and overturning itself with its wheels still spinning.
The terrified militiamen effected their escape by charging through the crowd with leveled bayonets. The crowd retreated but continued its destruction of railroad property, ripping rails from the ties, breaking windows, and setting trains alight. When firemen arrived to battle the blaze, the rioters cut their hoses and sabotaged their pumps.
Nightfall brought the calm of exhaustion and a reckoning of the casualties. At least ten people were dead, all of them members of the crowd. Additional dozens, including several militiamen, were wounded. Property damage was impossible to estimate so long as some of the fires still burned.23
THE VIOLENCE SPREAD to Pittsburgh. The depression had hammered the steel city, and though the steel industry was slowly recovering, the plants were operating far below capacity. Millworkers were restive and willing to lend support to their fellows of the rails. “We’re with you,” a steelman told the local of the Trainmen’s Union. “We’re in the same boat. I heard a reduction of ten per cent hinted at in our mills this morning. I won’t call employers despots; I won’t call them tyrants. But the term capitalists is sort of synonymous and will do as well.”
The labor solidarity spooked the guardians of the status quo. The Pittsburgh Leader reported what it deemed the ravings of a “representative workingman” who had declared that the recent events “may be the beginning of a great civil war in this country, between labor and capital.” The union man told the governor not to bother calling out the militia. “The laboring people, who mostly constitute the militia, will not take up arms to put down their brethren,” he predicted. Should President Hayes send in the army, the federal troops would be “swept from our path like leaves in the whirlwind.” America belonged to its people. “The workingmen of this country can capture and hold it, if they will only stick together.” The capitalists might win a round or two, but the workers would finally “have our revenge on the men who have coined our sweat and muscle into millions for themselves.”24
The local militia commander braced for the worst. Having orders to keep the peace but distrusting the Pittsburgh militiamen to fire on their neighbors, he requested reinforcements from Philadelphia. He prepared for their arrival by mounting two cannons above a road crossing of the Penn tracks. As the troop trains from Philadelphia approached the crossing, hundreds of workers and their supporters clogged the road and the track. The crowd pelted the trains with epithets, rocks, and paving stones. Rifle barrels ominously emerged from the train windows. But to the obvious relief of most and the apparent disappointment of some, no one fired. The trains inched slowly through the crowd to the downtown depot.
There the six hundred militiamen debarked from the cars and got ready to return to the crossing to clear the crowd. A Pittsburgh steel manufacturer, James Park, warned Alexander Cassatt of the Penn against hasty action. It was Saturday afternoon, and most of the steelworkers had started their weekend, which meant they were drinking and were available to join the rail workers. “I think I know the temper of our men pretty well,” Park told Cassatt. “You would be wise not to do anything until Monday.” He added that Cassatt didn’t have enough militia. “If there’s going to be firing, you ought to have at least ten thousand men, and I doubt if even that many could quell the mob that would be brought down on us.”
Cassatt closed his ears. “We must have our property,” he declared. “We have lost an hour and a half’s time.”
The militia moved out, shouldering rifles and pulling two Gatling guns. At the head of the column were the sheriff and more than a dozen deputies, carrying warrants for the arrest of eleven workers alleged to be instigators of the strike.
By now the crowd at the crossing numbered several thousand. They shouted at the soldiers and cursed the sheriff and the deputies. Many of the militia felt torn. One of their officers later observed, “Meeting an enemy on the field of battle, you go there to kill. The more you kill, and the quicker you do it, the better. But here you had men with fathers and brothers and relatives mingled in the crowd of rioters. The sympathy of the people, the sympathy of the troops, my own sympathy, was with the strikers.… We all felt that those men were not receiving enough wages.” But the officer had his job, and his orders. “The tracks must be cleared,” he said.
The men leveled their bayonets and pushed into the crowd. Those persons closest to the troops started to move away, but the wall of flesh behind them prevented escape. Some turned and tried to wrest the rifles from the soldiers’ grasp. Meanwhile members of the crowd farther away began hurling stones and chunks of coal at the troops. A witness recalled that one soldier “had the whole side of his face knocked off by a brick.”
The crowd taunted the soldiers: “Shoot, you sons of bitches, why don’t you shoot?” Firecrackers left over from Independence Day, just two weeks earlier, began exploding. Someone fired real shots—perhaps one of the soldiers, frightened for his life, perhaps a member of the crowd. The militia officers later denied having given the order to fire, but several said they would have done so if the firing hadn’t started on its own. In the time it took the crowd to realize that guns, and not firecrackers, were the source of the popping sounds heard over the general tumult, more than a dozen people were killed or fatally wounded. The casualties included women and children. A four-year-old girl’s knee was shattered by a rifle bullet, and the leg had to be amputated.
The militia gained control of the crossing but in the bargain lost the city. “It was evident,” one reporter asserted, “that the whole labor interest of Pittsburgh was about to fight the Pennsylvania Railroad.” The crowd that abandoned the crossing regathered at the Penn rail yards three blocks away. Individuals began torching freight cars, and then cars containing coke for the steel mills, and then anything else that would burn. To spread the fire some of the strikers rolled the flaming cars downhill and deliberately derailed them, spilling their fiery contents across the tracks and grounds. A roundhouse caught fire. Meanwhile a second wing of the mob attacked a federal arsenal nearby, seizing its weapons, including some cannons; when firemen arrived to extinguish the roundhouse blaze, the rioters trained a cannon on them and forced them to let the building burn. New fires broke out in several places around the city, obviously set separately. Looters followed the arsonists and didn’t confine themselves to railroad property. During all of Saturday evening and into Sunday morning a general conflagration threatened the city.25
Sunday newspapers weren’t common in the 1870s, but the events in Pittsburgh that weekend prompted publishers in several cities to print special editions. “Pittsburgh Sacked,” a typical headline read. “More Bloodshed!” The publishers doubtless believed they were doing their civic duty in reporting the breaking news; they certainly also appreciated the windfall profits the special editions generated. Not since the Civil War had papers sold so fast. The profit incentive trickled down to the newsboys who hawked the special editions on the street. “Strikers’ war!” they shouted. “Bloody battle in Pittsburgh!”
Most editors condemned the violence, but a few of the Pittsburgh papers (in those days most cities had several papers) sided with the strikers. One called the ongoing events “the Lexington of the labor conflict.” Another, with a large working-class readership, asserted, “There is tyranny in this country worse than anything ever known in Russia.… Capital has raised itself on the ruins of labor. The laboring class cannot, will not stand this any longer. The war cry has been raised.… The principle that freed our nation from tyranny will free labor from domestic aggression.”26
This hope of the workers was precisely the fear of the capitalists—and of many Americans with no such distinct class affiliations. Since the multinational revolutions of 1848, the “specter of communism,” as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels then put it, had been haunting Europe and the capitalist strongholds of America. But a more recent memory had a larger impact. In 1871 socialists in Paris had taken control of the French city, establishing a “commune,” a nascent workers’ republic that denied the primacy of capital and challenged existing property relations. The Communards employed lethal violence against their class enemies, who eventually rallied the army and crushed the socialist experiment. The corpses of tens of thousands of revolutionaries and their kin littered the streets of Paris.
Every capitalist in America knew about the Paris Commune, and most had congratulated themselves that such anarchy wasn’t possible in America. But the events in Pittsburgh smacked hard of anarchy. “War between labor and capital has begun in earnest,” the New Orleans Times asserted. “America’s first experience in communism is now the most significant episode of the most extraordinary year in our political history.” The Pittsburgh Leader, in the article reporting the labor radical’s declaration of civil war between labor and capital, concluded, “It will be seen that he is really a communist.” The New York Times decried the “tyranny of trades-unionism” and the “reign of mob law.” The New York World wondered succinctly in a headline: “Riot or Revolution?”27
THE STRIKE NOW spread across the country as tens of thousands of rail workers walked off the job. Many engaged in violence similar to that in Baltimore and Pittsburgh. In Buffalo an angry crowd besieged a militia regiment protecting a roundhouse of the Erie Railroad. Rocks rained down on the troops, who prepared to fire on their assailants. The crowd, painfully aware of the events at Pittsburgh, scattered—only to regroup at the yards of the New York Central. William Vanderbilt, who had learned some lessons himself from the Pittsburgh rioting, declined to challenge the strikers or fuel their arson. He simply suspended all New York Central traffic to Buffalo. The mob, eventually discerning Vanderbilt’s strategy, returned to the Erie yards, where they seized trains and manhandled their replacement crews. When a train arrived carrying militia reinforcements, the crowd fired on and stormed the cars, provoking the soldiers to return fire. Several rioters were killed and a comparable number of the soldiers wounded. As Buffalo was less friendly to workers than Pittsburgh, the sheriff had little difficulty deputizing some three hundred citizens, who supplemented the regular Buffalo police force. The latter, armed with riot sticks, caught up with a small crowd burning some New York Central rolling stock Vanderbilt hadn’t managed to extricate. The police captain gave the order to charge. “Like lightning the clubs ascended and descended,” an appreciative reporter explained. “Every stroke hit a new head whose owner went solid to the ground or bowled in continued somersaults. The officers seemed to put their whole souls into this commendable work.… Those who did not get hit fled as fast as legs could carry them.… A howling chorus of pain could be heard at the high trestle more than a mile way. The rout was complete and final.”
At Reading, Pennsylvania, rail workers and sympathizers sacked the depot of Franklin Gowen’s Reading Railroad. Lest they be fingered by company spies, the rioters painted their faces with coal dust before tearing up track, derailing and burning cars, and smashing equipment. They then marched to an iron-and-wooden bridge that spanned the Schuylkill River at the edge of town, soaked the timbers with coal oil, and set the structure ablaze. The bridge burned against the night sky till, to the cheers of the crowd, it crashed sizzling into the stream. Other rioters clashed with imported militiamen (some of whom came from the anthracite district, which they had patrolled on the day of the Molly Maguire hangings, to foil rescue attempts). Rocks and pistol fire struck the militiamen, who fired back at their assailants. Nearly a dozen persons were killed outright or mortally wounded.28
Railmen in Ohio halted trains there, although they didn’t have to try very hard as the shutdown farther east kept most trains from entering the state. A crowd in Cincinnati burned a bridge and might have burned other railroad property but for a drenching rain that kept putting out the fires they started. Serious trouble in Toledo was averted only after the police commissioner expressed his support for the strikers. “You are not slaves, gentlemen,” he said. “And I am glad to see you assert your manhood.” In Newark, a would-be strikebreaker was confronted by a striker shaking a fist, missing three fingers, in the man’s face. One of the striker’s comrades declared, “This is the man whose place you are taking. This is the man who works with a hand and a half to earn a dollar and a half a day, three days in the week, for his wife and children. Are you going to take the bread out of his mouth and theirs?” The strikebreaker changed his mind and left.
In Chicago, memories of the Great Fire of 1871 made everyone nervous about arson. Strikers seized trains of the several lines that converged at the city, while the police and militia girded for battle and the city elders decried the challenge to the rule of law. “As God lives and my soul lives,” the pastor of the Unity Church declared, “I would rather die in twenty minutes in defense of order and of our houses, against these men, than to live twenty years of as happy a life as I have lived all these fifty years.” When a squadron of police encountered a large crowd of rioters, batons and bullets felled the rioters by the dozen. “The blood and brains were oozing down his neck,” a reporter said of one rioter clubbed while trying to flee. “But buoyed by the unnatural excitement, he managed to continue with the others for quite a distance without falling. When he did fall, he was borne away by his comrades.” Another rioter wasn’t so lucky. “He fell with a bullet through the base of his uncultivated brain and lay like a log upon the pavement.”
The strike continued to spread—to St. Louis, which saw the spectacle of German-born radicals singing the French “Marseillaise” in symbolic solidarity with workers everywhere; to Galveston, which witnessed an alliance of African American and white workers; to Omaha, where the threat of violence compelled the management of the Union Pacific to rescind a recent pay cut; to San Francisco, where a large crowd cheered the burning of a wharf of the Pacific Mail Steamship Line, a subsidiary of the Central Pacific Railroad. (The San Francisco crowd completed the evening in customary California fashion, by rampaging through Chinatown.)29
THE GREAT STRIKE, as it was called as soon as its magnitude became apparent, was an artifact of the industrial era in one obvious way and one less patent. The obvious aspect was that workers felt themselves confronting a capitalist monolith. To be sure, the railroad corporations competed among themselves, but they acted alike toward their workers. When one cut wages, the rest did. When one hired Pinkertons and planted spies, the others followed. From a worker’s perspective, the salient characteristic of the modern age was consolidation. The railroads grew bigger and more powerful, by honest means and corrupt. The only hope for the workingman was offsetting consolidation. Labor unions were the first line of defense; where these needed to be supplemented by non-union workers and auxiliary crowds, perhaps armed with rocks and matches, more than a few unionists were willing to accept the help.
The less obvious aspect of the Great Strike was that it would not have been possible—that is, it would never have metastasized the way it did—without modern communications technology. The strike spread with the speed of telegraphy; San Francisco was rioting within days of the first battle in Pittsburgh. Had eastern rail workers walked off the job a generation earlier, the West wouldn’t have heard about their action for weeks, not till the exhausted Pony Express rider dropped his saddlebags in Sacramento.
And by then it would have been too late. After the outbreak of urban warfare in Pittsburgh, President Hayes felt enormous pressure to send federal troops to the rescue, as he had in Martinsburg. Railroad officials joined state and local authorities in pleading for the kind of muscle only the army of the Union could supply. But no sooner had Pittsburgh called than similar demands arose from Buffalo and Chicago and St. Louis. Even if he had wanted to accede to the demands, Hayes didn’t know where he’d get the troops. The huge Union army of the Civil War had long since dwindled to a force that could barely guard the frontier against Indians. If the president hoped to answer all the requests for troops, he’d have to ask for volunteers. But doing so would sound alarmist. The country was nervous enough already; Hayes wanted to calm things, not stir them up. “Tell the President a call for volunteers will precipitate a revolution,” a correspondent from Cincinnati wrote John Sherman, Hayes’s secretary of the Treasury. “Tell him I speak advisedly.” Besides, as the man who had just ended the military occupation of the South, Hayes hardly wanted to be known as the one who initiated the occupation of the North.30
So he bided his time. And as he did, the strike began to run out of steam. To some extent it was a victim of its own success. By now the strike had stopped or slowed traffic on perhaps two-thirds of the nation’s 75,000 miles of track. But because the strike had no central leadership, there was no way to coordinate the actions of all the strikers. Moreover, because most of the strikers belonged to no union, they lacked strike funds or other reserves that might have enabled them to survive without paychecks for more than a few weeks.
The railroads, by comparison, had very deep pockets. Even those that were in financial trouble had cash reserves that dwarfed anything the strikers could command. And though the railroads were less than united among themselves, their far smaller number than the strikers afforded them a decisive organizational advantage. By offering modest concessions here and there, they could hope to entice the most desperate workers back to the job and break the will of the rest.
They received crucial assistance from the courts. Some of the insolvent railroads had gone into receivership, making them wards of the federal courts. Clever lawyers for the railroads contended that this meant that obstructers of the operation of those railroads could be held in contempt of court, and sympathetic judges agreed. Federal arrest warrants against the leaders of the strike supplemented warrants approved by local courts.31
Against this opposition, the strikers were forced to retreat, then capitulate. Within weeks of its start, the Great Strike of 1877 was over. Conventional wisdom held that the strikers had lost, and in the near term they had. The workers were forced to accept most of the pay cuts that had started the whole affair. But labor learned from its failures. The conditions that gave rise to the strike hadn’t disappeared, and the next time the workers went out, they would be better prepared.
Nor were they the only ones who learned from the experience. “The strikes have been put down by force,” Hayes wrote in his diary in early August. “But now for the real remedy. Can’t something be done by education of the strikers, by judicious control of the capitalists, by wise general policy to end or diminish the evil? The railroad strikers, as a rule, are good men, sober, intelligent, and industrious.” To a friend he wrote, “If anything can be done to remove the distress which afflicts laborers, and to stimulate enterprises, I am ready and not afraid to do my share towards it.”32