Chicago in
Possession of Communists New York
Times, July 25, 1877
Communists In Chicago ... Thirteen Killed
New York Tribune, July 28, 1877
Pittsburgh Sacked: The City Completely in Power
... of Devilish Spirit of Communism
New York World, July 22, 1877
"Lead for the Hungry"
EDITOR'S NOTE:
This is the ninth excerpt from Labor's
Untold Story printed here by permission of the United
Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE).
The book can be purchased for $6.95, plus $2 postage for
single orders from the UE by writing to their
headquarters at 2400 Oliver Building, 535 Smithfield
Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15222.
Tom Scott, head of the Pennsylvania Railroad which moved
31,000,000 tons of freight and reported net earnings of
$22,000,000 in a depression year, was as imposing in his
way as the brilliant Gowen. He is described as a man of
"extraordinary charm, affable, friendly and
strikingly handsome." He was a strong man, too, who
believed in keeping labor in its place, and strong
enough, moreover, to decide who would be President of the
United States.
Scott's chance at President-making came in the election
of 1876 when Samuel J. Tilden, Democrat, had 184
electoral votes and Rutherford B. Hayes, Republican, 165.
With twenty electoral votes in dispute and both sides
claiming them, the contest was thrown into Congress to be
decided there. Hayes became President after Scott, and
others, contrived to win enough votes in Congress to
award the Republican candidate all of the disputed
electoral votes. It came about in this wise.
For all of his eminence Scott was hard pressed by the
panic of 1873. Heavily involved in his Texas and Pacific
Railroad, still a project rather than an actuality, he
decided that the only way he could avoid ruin was by
having the United States government subsidize the Texas
and Pacific through advancing him some $312,000,000 in
government bonds, including interest over a fifty-year
period. Scott promised Hayes the Presidency, if Hayes
would promise him the subsidy after becoming President.
The deal was made, according to C. Vann Woodward in Union
and Reaction.
Scott was able to deliver and make Hayes President
through his control of the votes of Southern Congressmen.
They wanted the Texas and Pacific, as well as other
internal improvements, almost as badly as Scott and upon
being assured that Hayes would back such a program they
double-crossed their own candidate, Tilden, and threw the
election to Hayes.8 This was one part of the
complicated maneuvering in which the Republicans
abandoned the Negro people in the South as another
inducement for Southern Democratic votes in the
Hayes-Tilden contest.
Thus, the alliance between Northern industrialists and
Southern planters was formalized in 1877. Reaction had
established a united front at the expense of the Negro
people in particular and the American people in general.
Under the circumstances reaction looked forward to the
future with confidence. The radical governments in the
South were no more and the militant leaders of the
Pennsylvania coal miners were being liquidated through
judicial murder. No wonder the Commercial and
Financial Chronicle reported "labor is under
control ..." This observation gained something of
the quality of a slogan for the short month between June
21 when the ten miners were hanged and July 16 when the
statement was proved definitely premature.
On that date the first nationwide strike in history broke
out on the railroads, a strike which spread from state to
state and city to city, from West Virginia to Kentucky
and Ohio, from New York to Chicago, from St. Louis to San
Francisco. As fast as the strike was broken in one place
it appeared in another. American troops fired on American
working men as regiments under General Phil Sheridan were
recalled from fighting the Sioux and thrown against the
workers of Chicago. There was the Battle of the
Roundhouse in Pittsburgh, bloody street fighting between
troops and workers in Baltimore, and skirmishes the
country over in which scores of workers were killed and
hundreds wounded.
From the first day of the strike the press declared it
was a Communist conspiracy to overthrow the government by
force and violence. It was not.9 It was the
depression exploding. It was four years of humiliation,
joblessness, and hunger erupting in struggle.
Women were particularly valiant as the strike spread,
hurling stones as they stood against the fire of United
States regulars. Children were killed in Pittsburgh and
elsewhere as they fought militia. Farmers came trooping
in from the countryside to help the strikers, whose ranks
were swollen by the unemployed, by coal miners, mill
workers, by all the thousands whose lives had been made
uncertain and bitter by depression.
The anger of the people mounted as the New York
Herald declared that "the mob is a wild beast
and needs to be shot down," and as the New York
Sun advocated "a diet of lead for the hungry
strikers." It increased as day after day the charge
was trumpeted that their strike to avert pay cuts and
speed-up was a Communist conspiracy, although it is
doubtful if many strikers knew what a Communist was.
Gradually it became clear to the strikers that the
Communist charge was leveled at their fellow strikers who
were members of the just-organized Workingmen's Party
which included many who believed that the nation's
economy should be owned and democratically operated by
the people for the benefit of the many instead of the
profit of the few.
But strikers knew that their strike had not been called,
that it had been spontaneous, spreading with the speed of
prairie fire as the result of intolerable grievances.
Wages of railroad workers had been cut so frequently that
earnings averaged between $5 and $10 a week although
railroad dividends remained high. There was work for but
three or four days a week, the rest of the week spent at
the other end of the line, waiting over for the trip
back, while paying a railroad hotel $1 a day. A man often
arrived home with less than fifty cents to show for a
week's work. In addition the number of cars in freight
trains was being doubled.
8 Hayes, however, after using Scott to obtain
the Presidency, double-crossed him and refused to back
the proposed government subsidy for the Texas and
Pacific.
9 In May, 1878, a committee of the
Pennsylvania state legislature, after prolonged inquiry,
formally reported that the Railroad Strike of 1877 was
not a Communist insurrection but the result of specific
grievances of railroad workers. "The railroad riots
of 1877 have by some been called an insurrection,"
said the report. "... "[They] were not a rising
against civil or political authority; in their origin
they were not intended by their movers as an open and
active opposition to the execution of the law ... It was
in no case an uprising against the law as such ... As
before stated, there was a sort of epidemic of strikes
running through the laboring classes of the country, more
particularly those in the employ of large corporations,
caused by the general depression of business, which
followed the panic of 1873, by means whereof many men
were thrown out of work, and the wages of those who could
get work were reduced. ..." (Report of the
Committee appointed to Investigate the [Pennsylvania]
Railroad Riots in July 1877, Legislative Document
No. 29, Harrisburg, 1878, p. 46.)
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