B   M   W   E
JOURNAL
 
ONLINE VERSION VOLUME 106 - NUMBER 9 - OCTOBER 1997
 
"Give Them A Rifle Diet"
 
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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