Chapter 10
In the late nineteenth century, to many in the rest of the United States, the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, a recently annexed Mexican territory, seemed alien and extraneous to developments in the nation. Likewise, in the 1880s and 1890s, from the perspective of most New Mexicans, the bulk of US land and people had very little relevance to everyday life in the former Mexican province.
The explosion of railroad building that laced New Mexico during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, however, tied the territory in unanticipated ways to social, political, and economic events and frameworks that originated east of the Mississippi. Occurrences far distant from the US–Mexico borderlands could suddenly turn New Mexican lives upside down. In particular, the rapid industrialization of the eastern United States following the Civil War brought on a parallel rise of the industrial labor movement.
Large-scale industrial work established conditions under which employers were able to exercise unprecedented control over workers’ lives, “where [they] resided, how frequently [they] moved, how much time [they] had for [their] famil[ies], how comfortable a life-style [they] could afford, and how long [they] might live.”1 Many workers formed organizations aimed at blunting the extraordinary power employers held over their lives. Beginning at the level of single local businesses, employee organizations sought some say-so over their members’ hours, pay levels, and working conditions. Fierce resistance from some employers to what they saw as their employees wantonly ganging up on them sparked efforts to strengthen worker organizations by banding together with other similar groups. The resulting fraternal craft associations were not altogether new, harkening back all the way to medieval European guilds.
Tit-for-tat countermeasures by employers and workers resulted in allied crafts—for instance, railroad engineers and firemen—combining their associations into ever larger entities. In 1886, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) came into being as a national alliance of fraternal craft organizations. The railroad shop crafts were slower to organize for collective bargaining.
A heavy anti-union sentiment long dominated both the New Mexico territorial-state government as well as the management and ownership of the Santa Fe, which repeatedly and regularly railed against the “excessive” demands of railroad workers’ brotherhoods. The company over and over blamed unions for threatening its economic survival. This statement from the company’s annual report for 1914 is typical: “[AT&SF] employes [sic] . . . are a credit to themselves and to the road. Left to themselves there would be little of which to complain, but the [labor] organizations as a body have been demanding increased wages for their members with no regard for the ability of their employers to pay.”2 Nevertheless, “in 1892 the Santa Fe [had become] the first [railroad] to sign contracts with the International Association of Machinists, the International Brotherhood of Blacksmiths, the National Brotherhood of Boilermakers, and the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen.”3 Included in those contracts were provisions for wage increases and improved working conditions for shopmen represented by those organizations.
Only a year later, when convulsion in the railroad industry opened what has come to be called the depression of the nineties, AT&SF reneged on the shopmen’s contracts, and the workforce at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops—as well as New Mexico in general—experienced outsized seismic shocks. In mid-April 1893, shopmen throughout the Santa Fe system walked off the job. In New Mexico that included especially shopmen at Raton, Las Vegas, and San Marcial. By April 18, Santa Fe trains had been abandoned at several places in Kansas because of a lack of locomotives in safe running order. And non-union replacement workers at La Junta, Colorado, had joined the strike of union shopmen there. Even though work stoppages were not reported at Albuquerque, train traffic throughout the Western Division of the AT&SF fell off drastically. The virtual absence of strike activity at Albuquerque may have been due to the fact that Albuquerque was headquarters for the division and therefore was home to many members of the company’s management, who were able to prevail on the shopmen there to continue working. On April 25, the Las Vegas Daily Optic reported, “The strike on the Atchison is ended.”4 The decisive factor in ending the strike in favor of the shopmen was the inability of the AT&SF to recruit and hold a sufficient number of replacement workers to keep locomotives serviced, while perishable cargos began rotting in box cars.5
For the general public, both in New Mexico and in the nation as a whole, the 1890s depression began with a horrifying rise in bank and business failures, including in February 1893 the bankruptcy of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. That would be only the first of many railroad failures. By the middle of 1894, 156 railroads had failed, including the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. Further, the national unemployment rate was running at nearly 20 percent.6 Business in all fields declined, including in the transportation of goods and people by rail. As we saw in chapter 7, the AT&SF went into receivership in December 1893, even though the shopmen’s strike had ended and full operation had been restored before the end of April of that year. Of all the railroads that failed that year, “the Santa Fe was the largest in track miles—4,483—and the largest in capital investment: $228 million in bonds and $102 million in stock, or a total amounting to a third of a billion dollars.”7
In December 1895, a purchasing committee bought the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad Company at public auction, comprising all its track, rolling stock, facilities, and other property, including the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops. With a slight name change—from Railroad to Railway—the purchasers reorganized the company without causing interruption in rail service or work by employees. During its first six months of existence, the new company spent about $1.1 million on shops and shopwork systemwide. As of June 30, 1895, the AT&SF owned 839 locomotives subject to periodic maintenance in its shops.8
Over the next twenty-five years, the number of AT&SF locomotives rose to 2,195, an increase of about 160 percent.9 It was two and a half decades of spectacular, if uneven, growth for the company. It was also a period during which the managements of many railroads took steps to prevent a recurrence of their feeling of impotence during the 1893 shopmen’s strike. The next time, they thought, they would be ready with overwhelming force to put down any similar labor action by the railroad crafts. And, indeed, in the very next year of 1894 the Pullman Strike was violently put down.
But the railroads could not anticipate the national political shift of US entrance into World War I, and how those events would reshape labor relations in the United States. In 1912, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, the former president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey, won a four-way race for US president, breaking what had been a decades-long Republican lock on the office. This was the first election in which New Mexico took part as a state.
On taking office, Wilson called a special session of Congress, which was also in Democratic control. Together, Wilson and the Congress enacted a series of “progressive” laws, including the Newlands Labor Act that established the Board of Mediation and Conciliation, the charge of which was to intervene in disputes between railroads and their operating workforces. The Board was a failure, but it was a harbinger of things to come. Wilson was clearly more supportive of industrial workers than his predecessors had been. The Adamson Act of 1916, for example, set a national standard of the eight-hour day for railroad employees in the operating crafts (engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors). And in 1917, the eight-hour standard was also extended to shopmen.10
War had erupted in Europe in 1914. For two and a half years, Wilson attempted to hold the United States out of that horrific conflict, but in April 1917 he finally asked for a declaration of war, and Congress consented. That precipitated the sudden and sustained dispatch of thousands of troops and the equipment and materiel to support them, mostly from East Coast ports. Getting personnel and supplies to the ports of embarkation was the job of the nation’s railroads, which seemed incapable of coordinating adequately among themselves. A glut of freight cars on the East Coast clogged the port facilities; meanwhile, there was a shortage of rolling stock in much of the rest of the country. The result was a dangerous transportation crisis.
In the face of impending military disaster caused by the railroad gridlock, Wilson nationalized all the railroads on December 26, 1917, thereby turning some 2 million railroad workers into government employees.11 In order for such a national rail system to work, the patchwork of hundreds of different work rules, pay scales, and corporate procedures maintained by the private railroads had to be replaced by a single, uniform, nationwide organizational and operational structure. Also essential was a shift in labor relations from confrontation between owners and workers to cooperation between administration and staff within a large public entity. Almost overnight, labor unions were recognized as a valuable mechanism for keeping labor relations on an even keel.
The national government became the advocate for both administration and staff, with a desire to ensure fairness to both those necessary components of a smoothly functioning railroad system. With corporate profit no longer the governing principle of railroad operations, the Wilson administration encouraged the expansion of railroad unions. For example, labor organizers began a campaign on the AT&SF in February 1918. When the company retaliated by firing some of the union shopmen, the US Railroad Administration announced that the company could not single out union members and officials. Later that year the Board of Railroad Wages and Working Conditions raised shopmen’s hourly pay rate to sixty-eight cents an hour. “This award, in effect, standardized the wage levels for the nation’s shopmen.”12
As recorded in the proceedings of the 1918 convention of the Railway Employees’ Department (RED) of the AFL, this was “the first time in history our Government has given full voice in the conduct of its affairs to labor.”13 Optimism within labor unions was running very high, and they were seeing results they liked.
But then the war ended, and immediately railroad stockholders and officers began agitating for the return of unfettered authority over their companies. Less than two months after the signing of the armistice ending the war, Wilson agreed that control of the railroads would be restored to their owners by January 1, 1920. Before the end of February 1920, Congress passed and President Wilson signed the Transportation Act of 1920, establishing March 1 as the date on which private ownership of the railroads would resume. Among many other provisions, the act also established the Railroad Labor Board, which was empowered to decide disputes over wages and salaries.14 In what later seemed like a final act of goodwill, in July, the Board voted to raise the hourly wage for shopmen by thirteen cents.
By the time of the presidential election in November 1920, though, a national economic downturn was underway, and layoffs of shopmen began. Warren Harding, a Republican, succeeded Wilson as president in 1921, and the layoffs continued. This was part of a concerted strategy by railroad companies to break the power of unions and “re-establish the prewar relationship between the railroads and their employees.”15 The new Harding administration’s sympathies were decidedly with the railroad ownership. In June 1921 the Railroad Labor Board voted to cut all railroad workers’ pay by an average of 12.5 percent.16 The railroads now adopted new strategies to circumvent federal wage requirements: the substitution of piece work for payment of hourly wages and the subcontracting of operation of facilities for repair of locomotives and other rolling stock. Then in July 1922 wages for shopmen were scheduled to be cut again, this time by seven cents an hour.17
In response, nationally on July 1, about 250,000 shopmen walked off the job, including 1,000 in Albuquerque. The following day the Albuquerque Morning Journal published a statement to the public from the Local Federation of Shopmen, from which the following excerpts are taken: “In behalf of the 98 percent of railroad shop employees who yesterday withdrew their services from the railroad company, we desire to give the public a brief statement of the issues involved:
([issue #] 3) The decision of the United States railroad labor board to again cut wages of the employees 56 cents per day on all mechanics, helpers and apprentices, except freight carmen, whom it is proposed to cut 72 cents per day.
. . . The third proposition, upon the wage question, is the straw that broke the camel’s back, and when our friends really understand what is contemplated in the latest decision of the board, we feel sure we will have your unqualified sympathy and support. . . . In December, 1917, this class of mechanics received $5 for a day’s work; under the new proposed scale of pay they would get $5.60, or twelve percent more than they received in 1917, instead of 29% more, as stated by the railroad and public members of the labor board. Why this misrepresentation, if they wished to be fair? Why also did they not cut supervisory forces in proportion, if they wanted to be fair?
. . . The proposed reduction, being the same for helpers and apprentices, will affect these classes of employees proportionately greater.
. . . We feel that this decision is a miscarriage of justice; that that portion of the transportation act requiring that consideration must be given [to] “the relation between wages and the cost of living” was disregarded; and we have therefore exercised our precious American privilege of withdrawing our services from the railroad company.18
Within days nationally, “a combined total of 400,000 shopmen [had] downed their tools.” But “the railroads reacted swiftly and instituted a well-organized counter offensive. An army of guards was recruited to protect railroad property and the movement of strikebreakers.”19
The AT&SF took a hard line on the subject of striking workers. As reported in the Morning Journal (July 7, 1922), company officials stated that “Practically all men who quit work learned their trade with the Santa Fe and . . . we can train new [men] to fill their places . . . [it will] not be a difficult task.” A sample of oral histories on file at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque indicates that many workers in the Barelas neighborhood went back to work within weeks of the strike being called because they were fearful of losing their jobs permanently. Of the others who stayed on strike, many never returned to railroad work because they were blacklisted by the company.20
Within a week of the beginning of the strike, scabs, or more euphemistically “replacement workers,” were substituting for strikers at the Shops in Albuquerque. An accusation of working as a scab resulted in an automobile accident on July 7 at the intersection of 1st and 2nd Streets, near the western entrance to the Shops.21 According to a long-time resident of the Barelas neighborhood in Albuquerque, the AT&SF recruited replacement workers in Mexico and brought them onto the Shop grounds in cattle cars, hidden among the cattle.22
On the day after the strike began, the shopmen’s crafts declared the strike “100 percent perfect,” although National Guard units were being put at the ready to stand behind the railway companies. This was in response to several cases in the Midwest of intimidation, both verbal and physical, of strikebreakers by union members.23 Earlier that week, on July 6, Albuquerque machinist William Bletz, who had stayed on the job, filed a complaint against two striking pipe fitters, Gus Brito and Maurice Cowell, whom he accused of having beaten him up. Further, it was being said that massed strikers planned to storm the Albuquerque Shops, which the company had ordered stockaded.24 Likewise, Barelas resident Jennie Bargas-García remembered that “strikers were mean to her father and called him names and pushed him” because he did not go out on strike.25 “Whatever cause could be assigned to a particular strike, the motivation behind the decisions of individual railroaders was more complex. An individual worker had to consider his family, his chances for reemployment, and whether striking could jeopardize his ownership of his home. Moreover, he was affected by his social relations: failure to strike when most of his peers were struggling against the company could cost a man the respect and friendship of his closest associates.”26
With Albuquerque apparently having no shortage of shopmen on the job, on July 15, carpenters and mechanics were sent from there to the shops at La Junta, Colorado, to assist with building permanent bunkhouses for replacement workers in anticipation of a possibly lengthy strike.27 As noted earlier, the La Junta shops had been a hotbed of union activity during the 1893 shopmen’s strike. This suggests that the company, in 1922, not wanting a recurrence of the earlier stubborn disruption of its business, strategically sited the replacement workers’ dormitory at La Junta to intimidate especially active union members there.
In late July the AT&SF attempted to bluff its way to a systemwide settlement by asserting that with only 57 percent of its shop workforce, it was able to keep its trains running according to their usual schedules. Meanwhile, the Burlington claimed to be adding “250 to 325” new strike-breaking shop employees every day during the strike.28 Just a week before, the Santa Fe was advertising in the Albuquerque Morning Journal, “Men Wanted . . . Machinists, Boilermakers, Sheet Metal Workers, Electricians, Car Men and Helpers.” These were men intended to take the place of strikers.29 Both the company and the strikers filled the newspaper with propaganda, the brotherhoods saying that they had never had more support than they were then receiving, and AT&SF insisting that it was “now moving more freight in New Mexico than at any period in the past two years.”30 These were radically divergent portrayals of the state of affairs during the strike.
Figure 10.1. Scan of an ad for shopworkers placed by AT&SF on page 10 of the Albuquerque Morning Journal, Sunday, July 23, 1922, just over three weeks after the Shopmen’s Strike began.
Map 10.1. Scan of national map showing railroads and coal mining areas affected by concurrent strikes by shopworkers and coal miners, top-center of page 1 of the Albuquerque Morning Journal, Sunday, July 23, 1922.
In the midst of the continuing strike, on September 23, 1922, the company launched the building of a new boiler shop at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops complex.31 (Much more about construction of the new Shop buildings appears in chapter 11.) At this point, it is an open question as to how many of the strikers may have signed onto construction crews so that they actually kept working for AT&SF even as the shopmen’s strike continued.
Strikers who took other railroad jobs within the Albuquerque Shops, elsewhere within the system or with other railroads, were commonly reviled by their fellows. Sometimes that caused the breakup of friendships and family relations, when a striker decided to seek alternative railroad employment.
Exceedingly injurious to their national collective bargaining position “were the large numbers of striking shopmen who went scabbing on railroads other than their own.”32 When strikers took work in the shops of other railroads, they made it possible, through a kind of musical chairs, for many railroads to maintain their locomotive repair schedules and, thus, to keep trains running throughout the country. As a result, the striking shopmen could never significantly disrupt the nation’s daily train traffic. Had they been able to halt entirely the nationwide flow of goods and people by rail for even a week or two, public outcry probably would have brought the strike to a conclusion in short order in the shopmen’s favor.
But the immediate needs of shopmen and their families for money to purchase the basics of urban life, food, clothing, and shelter produced and offered for sale by others, pushed way too many of them toward the easiest remedy. That was to move to another town and to another locomotive repair shop, where other strikers had left their jobs vacant and where they could earn wages they were used to. That could have been as easy as taking a day-long train trip to another place hundreds of miles away, where the striker wasn’t known as such, and responding to an ad like those posted by the AT&SF in the Albuquerque Morning Journal.
On top of that, for too long the shopmen’s common macho attitudes stood in the way of their seeking financial support during the strike from others in their communities. Sometimes, even accepting support from within their own families was too painful for men who saw themselves as up to any task. As Colin Davis writes, “Initially reluctant to organize women in auxiliaries, strikers in Albuquerque recognized their error: ‘We made a mistake here [one of them was quoted as saying] in not earlier inviting the ladies to cooperate with us, but now that we are on the right track, we will try to make up for lost time.’”33
But recovery of strike momentum seemed out of reach. The strike stretched into a month, and then two, and then three. By that time, on September 15, regional railroads like the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy (CB&Q) had begun chipping away at the national character of the shopmen’s strike by entering into an “agreement embracing a new schedule of rates of pay and working rules” with only its own shop employees.34 This became a concerted strategy of the railroads. Not only did it get shopmen back to work, but it tore apart the idea of national unions.
Then, at a September meeting of the RED of the AFL, the leadership supported the idea of separate contracts, but the rank and file fought to hold the strike together until a national settlement could be reached, arguing that any “separate agreement would, ‘tear down the morale of 50% of our men on other roads’” and would disrespect the “men now in jail and the men under six feet of ground who went out for the principle of a National settlement.”35 But the union leadership held sway, and the settlement with the CB&Q was signed, confirming a rupture within the unions that would prove fatal to success of the strike.
Nearly three months into the strike, on September 23, 1922, a US District Court judge issued a nationwide temporary injunction against the strike by shopmen.36 Thereafter, “increasingly, federal judges came to view railroads as semipublic enterprises, and thus any threat to their operation could be enjoined under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.”37 The shopmen’s strike and the strength of the shop-craft unions were effectively undermined by injunctions.
The effects of the CB&Q settlement and the national injunction are seen clearly in the numbers of railroad machinists employed nationally between June and October 1922. In June before the strike began, 55,410 machinists were on the job. With commencement of the strike on July 1, that number collapsed to only 18,070 for the month of July. In September, though, after replacement workers had been aggressively recruited by the railroads and the national temporary injunction had been put in place, the total number of machinists at work had climbed back to 38,550. And by the end of October, the national employment roster of railroad machinists, 56,680, actually exceeded the pre-strike level.38
Figure 10.2. Photo of button commemorating the 1922 shopmen’s strike.
The local impact of the strike in Albuquerque is harder to gauge. At the time, local news sources seem to have been reluctant to make statements that might have been seen as encouraging to either labor or the company. As a result, the Albuquerque Morning Journal appears to have made a concerted attempt to ignore the strike, to publish news about anything but the strike when possible. So, it is in only seemingly casual, even inadvertent, printed remarks that hints about the strike’s local impact emerge.
It may be that the strike’s direct effect on the Albuquerque workforce was reduced because only nine months earlier shopmen had begun to return to work in the new facility after a months-long closure of the machine shop. It is unlikely that the number of employees was yet back up to what it had been before construction. That means that a pool of furloughed employees would have been locally available to take the place of striking shopmen, thus discouraging strikers from any prolonged work stoppage.39
As additional local and regional contracts were signed by shop-craft organizations across the country during the remainder of 1922 and through 1923, dwindling numbers of tenacious local strikers continued to hold out for what they saw as the only hope for their profession, an equal seat at the bargaining table with the railroad owners. “By November 1923, the strikes were in serious trouble. . . . Termination of strikes continued during late 1923 and 1924. . . . The major problem was the inability of the shop crafts to send help [to the remaining strikers]. . . . On many of the railroad systems the lines of strikers held tight. What these men and their families had been unable to control, however, was the continuing output of rolling stock from inside the railroad shops.”40 The trains kept moving, and ultimately the American public saw the strikes as only a painful nuisance.
By early 1925 only two regional shopmen’s strikes remained active in the United States, both on Eastern railroads. They dragged on until 1928. But already, since the failure of the strike to establish a national shopmen’s union in 1922, workers in most locomotive repair shops had been left essentially without leverage to counter unilateral mandates by the railroad companies with regard to wages, hours, seniority, and working conditions. As elsewhere across the country, the shop workforce at Albuquerque had little recourse from arbitrary dictates and decisions of the Santa Fe owners and management.
One of the impacts of the 1922 shopmen’s strike in Albuquerque was an additional influx of Hispanic workers into the Shops, many coming from nearby farming communities, such as Belen, Los Lunas, and Tomé, to take the place of strikers.41 Another result was the permanent loss of work at the Shops by many men who had gone out on strike. Two such men were the father-in-law of Frank Archibeque of Barelas and Rufina Salazar-Montaño’s father.42 The company’s dominant concern with breaking the national shopmen’s organization overrode what had been a pervasive bias against the hiring of journeymen Hispanic shopworkers and the promotion of Hispanic helpers and apprentices. The net effect, fully unintended, was an increase in ethnic diversity among the skilled workforce at the Shops.
To shed new light on this influx of Hispanics into the Shops, we analyzed data taken from Hudspeth’s Albuquerque City Directories for 1919 and 1925, before and after the shopmen’s strike of 1922. What that analysis shows is that in each of the six largest job categories, machinists, machinist apprentices, machinist helpers, boilermakers, boilermaker apprentices, and boilermaker helpers, the Hispanic share of the Shops’ workforce increased from before the strike to after the strike. With the exception of boilermaker helpers, among which category Hispanos already made up 76.9 percent of the workers in 1919, in all five other job categories Hispanos saw significant increases in their share of the workforce, ranging from 10.4 percent increase for boilermaker helpers, 24.7 percent increase for machinist helpers, and 25.5 percent increase for machinists, to a whopping 71.2 percent increase for machinist apprentices. In addition, in 1925 there were a minimum of ten Spanish-surnamed boilermaker apprentices, where in 1919 there had been none. (For a broader view, see appendix 2: Ethnicity of Shopworkers in Six Job Classifications, 1919, 1925, 1943, and 1950.)
As a further indication of the convulsions within the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops workforce that came about largely because of the 1922 strike, only 36 of the 198 AT&SF journeyman machinists listed in the 1919 City Directory (including just 7 Hispanos) are also listed in the 1925 edition of the Directory.43 That translates into a huge attrition rate among journeyman machinists over that six years of 81.8 percent. In addition, only 4 men who were recorded as either machinist apprentices or machinist helpers in 1919 had moved into the ranks of journeyman machinists in 1925. The company had clearly terminated the employment of most of its technically skilled workers. As Carmen Aragón-Moya, a teacher in the Barelas area, put it, the Santa Fe “fired the workers and hired more people.”44
Thus, despite the scanty print record of discord and disruption during the 1922 strike as registered in contemporaneous news media, it is clear that the strike utterly transformed the roster of workers at the Shops and consequently must have radically upset the lives of most Albuquerque shopmen and their families. Unemployment was followed by marginalized existence for many, often succeeded by migration away from Albuquerque.