The Great Railroad Revolution (44 page)

The first stirrings of labor organization occurred before the Civil War, but they were very local in scope and generally involved only a small number of skilled workers. In 1863, a Brotherhood of the Footboard, later
becoming the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, was formed in Michigan, and this was soon followed by similar brotherhoods representing railroad conductors and “locomotive firemen and enginemen.” These were still, however, not modern-style unions organized to put pressure on management to improve wages and conditions, but rather fraternal organizations providing mutual support and holding social events. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, larger brotherhoods and craft unions began to emerge. Not surprisingly, the railroad companies were reluctant to recognize organized labor.

However, the size of the railroad companies meant that it was not the owners who would make decisions about union recognition, but rather the new breed of professional managers who were employed to run these big corporations. Gradually, they realized that negotiating with the men was unavoidable. Attempts to hire unskilled “scabs” inevitably led to failure, since most railroad jobs required skills and experience. The managers were faced with uniquely powerful opponents who were further strengthened by their sheer numbers. It is hardly surprising that the railroads were fertile territory for union organization and, indeed, would become “the seedbed of the American labour movement.”
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The brotherhoods' industrial and political strength meant that they could pioneer methods of collective bargaining, union organization, and grievance procedures that later would become universal across the labor movement. Railroad workers were able to exploit their skills by moving to rival railroads, often in the expectation of bettering themselves, even if by only a few cents an hour. This practice became so prevalent that those who drifted from job to job in this way became known as “boomers.”

Railroad workers were involved in three major strikes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and although all of them were effectively defeats, these actions were an inspiration for the railroad workers to form strong unions. Labor relations were to be an Achilles' heel for the industry. Having initially made too few concessions regarding working practices, the railroads' vulnerability to industrial action led them at times to concede too readily to union demands. This would later result in significant levels of overstaffing, endless damaging disputes over job demarcations, and a lack of flexibility that would cost the railroad companies dearly.

The railroad companies reacted to the first major strike, in 1877, which was in response to the imposition of wage reductions, with typical heavy-handedness. After a period of economic decline caused by the panic of 1873, several railroad companies had unilaterally cut wage levels, arguing that the reduction was necessary in order to maintain or reestablish profitability. Many found their action particularly galling, since it was the railroads' overinvestment and borrowing that had been largely responsible for the 1873 crisis in the first place. The panic had been triggered by the collapse of Jay Cooke & Company, a bank that had loaned heavily to the Northern Pacific Railway but then found itself unable to sell the resulting bonds. It was, in fact, the culmination of years of overbuilding on the railroads, fueled by speculators. Collapse was inevitable. With the Crédit Mobilier scandal breaking at around the same time, all confidence in the banks was lost. Rather cheekily, Cornelius Vanderbilt suggested that the underlying problem was that government money had been wasted on “building railroads from nowhere to nowhere,” which, he said, was not a legitimate undertaking, although he insisted he remained a friend of the iron horse.
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The panic spread quickly, other banks went under, and a lengthy depression, the longest in American history to that date, set in. The railroads, hit by falling demand and with large fixed costs—railroads are asset-hungry behemoths that cannot easily cut spending when there is a downturn in the economy, which is why so many around the world have ended up in state hands—tried to reduce wages, one of the few areas of expenditure under their control. The workers, however, for the first time began to resist in a united show of force. The men on the Baltimore & Ohio, whose wages were already lower than those of their counterparts on other railroads at $3.00 per twelve-hour day for engineers and a mere $1.75 for brakemen, were the first to crack. In response to the second pay cut in a year, on July 14, 1877— coincidentally the anniversary of the French Revolution—workers began to prevent wagons from leaving the depot at Martinsburg, West Virginia, until the cut was revoked. The militia was sent in but refused to fire on the workers, and the strike soon spread to Cumberland, Maryland, where a serious battle between strikers, supported by many local people, and the militia resulted in ten rioters being killed. Soon workers on the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had also cut wages, and other railroad companies began to
join in, often with considerable support from factory workers in other major industries such as steel and mining. Thomas Scott, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, inflamed matters by suggesting that strikers should be given “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.”
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Indeed, as the strike extended well beyond the rail industry, there were concerns among industrialists that it was the start of a revolutionary movement. With good reason. In Pittsburgh, the militia called in from Phila delphia killed twenty people as they sought to regain control of the streets, but this merely served to infuriate the mobs. When at least twenty thousand people took to the streets and destroyed large amounts of railroad property, including burning down the roundhouse and destroying a hundred locomotives, the guards could only stand and watch. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the mobs were so strong that the military retreated and handed in their weapons to the strikers. There were major strikes and confrontations in Chicago and East St. Louis also, but the action petered out after a few weeks when President Rutherford Hayes sent federal troops from state to state to quell the protests. Although a few local brotherhoods were involved in the strike, for the most part it was a spontaneous uprising by workers, with railroad men leading the way.

A precursor of the powerful rail unions that eventually emerged was the Knights of Labor, which flourished briefly in the 1870s and 1880s. The Knights led the second of these major struggles, the Great Southwest Railroad strike of 1886, which at its height saw two hundred thousand men withdraw their labor. The Knights were less concerned with the immediate terms and conditions of the workers, but rather sought to replace the wage system with cooperative enterprises—in the words of their leader, Terence Powderly, “to make each man his own employer.”
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However, in March 1886, when one of their members in Texas was fired for attending a union meeting by the Texas & Pacific Railroad, owned by the railroad baron Jay Gould, the men walked out, and Powderly used the opportunity to demand a minimum wage of $1.50 and recognition of the union. Gould refused to make any concessions, and thousands of men on his other railroads, which included the Union Pacific and the Missouri Pacific, also walked out. Crucially, the Brotherhood of Engineers did not support the strike and kept working. Gould brought in strikebreakers and the
well-organized Pinkerton thugs, boasting, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” Violence escalated. The workers destroyed many railroad facilities and indulged in acts of sabotage—for example, letting locomotives run out of steam, thereby putting them out of operation for at least six hours. However, the workers were under fierce pressure, and the intimidation from the militia in several states, supported by gangs of thuggish Pinkerton men recruited by Gould, forced them back to work in the summer of 1886.

The failure of these two strikes highlighted the difficulties of organizing railroad workers on a national scale. The unions were still in embryonic form and based locally, but this was changing rapidly. In the 1880s, union leaders sought to move away from the restrictive craft-based model of organizing and, instead, sought to create a single union that would represent all railroad workers. It was not an easy enterprise. The sheer variety of jobs carried out by railroad employees and their tendency to guard demarcation lines with as much determination as Davy Crockett defending the Alamo were almost insuperable barriers.

Nevertheless, Eugene V. Debs, a founder of the brakemen's national union and later an iconic figure in the annals of the American Left, formed the American Railway Union in June 1893. He emphasized that the union was open to all railroad workers and even those employed by suppliers such as repair shops and factories making parts. The union had an early success when it staged a walkout against the Great Northern Railway, persuading the normally obdurate James J. Hill to make substantial concessions. Within a year of the creation of the union, however, its members found themselves up against an even tougher opponent when it became enmeshed in the railroads' most notorious industrial-relations battle of the century, the Pullman strike of 1894. Again, the trigger was an economic depression following the panic of 1893, which like the previous slump was the result of a combination of bank failures and overbuilding of railroad lines. Early in the year, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad went bankrupt. Then, following a series of bank failures, three major railroad companies—the Northern Pacific Railway, the Union Pacific Railroad, and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad—also went under in the last two months of 1893, starting a recession. The Pullman Company, which was dependent on the economic health
of the railroad companies that hauled its cars, announced redundancies at its factory along with cuts to the remaining workers' wages, claiming that these moves were necessary to maintain profitability. That was bad enough, but the workers were particularly angered by Pullman's refusal to reduce rents on the houses in the company town where most of them lived. In May 1894, Pullman workers, who had formed an active American Railway Union local branch, started walking off the job, and soon 3,000 were on strike, bringing the works to a halt. They asked Debs, who was a cautious and conservative trade unionist, to support them, and, though reluctant, he had no choice but to throw the weight of the union behind them. The strike quickly became a national one, as railroad workers across the country refused to handle Pullman cars. Within four days an estimated 125,000 men on twenty-nine railroads had walked out in sympathy and refused to cross picket lines. They were emboldened by the growing Populist movement, with its demands for the national ownership of the utilities and railroads, which had reached its height at this point. Few of the Pullman Company's large number of black on-board staff dared to strike, fearing they would lose their jobs because of discrimination, which gave a nasty racial edge to the dispute.

Despite all the support and solidarity, defeat for the workers was inevitable. It was not a propitious time for a national strike, given the recession and the importance with which the railroads, still the country's largest business apart from agriculture, were regarded by politicians and industrialists. Both managers and politicians quickly set their faces against the union. The General Managers' Association, representing the railroad company, pushed the federal government into action, and the president, Grover Cleveland, appointed Richard Olney as a special federal attorney to deal with the strike. Olney had experience in this respect. He had been the chief lawyer for the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, and as attorney general he had previously tried to prevent strikes through the use of the law. Now he instructed state district attorneys to issue injunctions against strikers on the basis that they were preventing the delivery of mail, which was a federal offense. It was a legal precedent, as such injunctions had not been used before, but it was not enough to break the strike. That required calling up 12,000 troops, who, together with the local states' national guards, proved ruthless in combating
the massed strikers and ensuring the trains kept running. It was not an easy process, nor a foregone conclusion. The strikers had considerable support and in several towns received favorable coverage from the local news papers, particularly in California, where even the
San Francisco Examiner
, owned by William Randolph Hearst, was sympathetic to their cause. Moreover, marshals sent in by the authorities were often reluctant to act against the strikers: “All over the West, the failure of marshals either to act or to act effectively and the peacefulness of the strikers frustrated railroad attorneys who wanted much more vigorous federal intervention.”
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Ultimately, Olney won, thanks to his readiness to exploit legislation: “Olney intervened not so much to enforce federal laws, or move the mail, or protect federal property, as to demonstrate the power of the government, its right to intervene and to break the strike.”
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Altogether, thirteen railroad workers were killed in fights with the men sent in by the federal government, and many more injured during a series of confrontations. Olney, however, was not satisfied, pursuing Debs and several other strikers through the courts for breaking the injunction and interfering with the mails. Along with several other strike leaders, Debs was sent to prison for six months, despite an impassioned defense from the renowned civil liberties lawyer Clarence Darrow. Imprisonment radicalized Debs, who became a Socialist, standing five times for president on that ticket, and receiving, incidentally, an impressive 6 percent of the vote in 1912 and 1920.

Many thousands of workers who took part in the 1894 strike were black listed and effectively barred from future employment on the railroads, as their service letters were written on stationery secretly carrying a watermark showing a swan with a broken neck. George Pullman himself paid a heavy price for the conflict. From being a much-feted entrepreneur, he spent the remainder of his life being hounded by supporters of the strikes. When he died just three years later, he was buried at night in a lead-lined coffin, and several tons of concrete were poured around it to prevent his body from being exhumed and desecrated by militants.