EDITOR'S NOTE:

This is the tenth and last 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.

The immediate cause of the strike was still another 10 percent pay cut announced for June 1 on the Pennsylvania and for a month later on most other lines. It started outside of Baltimore early on the morning of July 16 when forty Baltimore & Ohio firemen and brakemen quit. An hour later it had spread to Martinsburg, W. Va., where 1,200 brakemen and firemen seized the depot, stopping all freight trains. As miners and Negro farm hands trooped into Martinsburg to help, the Mayor arrested the strike's leaders, then released them as the workers prepared to storm the jail. Governor Matthews of West Virginia dispatched the state militia to the scene and when they fraternized with the strikers he appealed for federal troops to President Hayes, who held his office through the help of Scott and his railroad lobby.

They arrived at six in the morning on July 19 under General French. "The mass of strikers and their friends received the regulars without demonstrations of any kind," wrote Joseph A. Dacus in a contemporary account. "At ten o'clock an attempt was made to start a freight train from Martinsburg toward Baltimore. A locomotive was fired up, while guarded by the military; a large company of strikers had assembled; the Sheriff was present with a posse; an engineer named Bedford was found willing to go and he mounted the cab. But he did not run the train out.... Just as it was about to move away Bedford's wife rushed from the crowd, mounted the engine and with agonizing cries besought him to leave the position. The engineer heeded the entreaties, and departed from the engine, followed by the fireman, which conduct elicited prolonged cheers from the strikers and their sympathizers...."

After arresting strike leaders General French wired Washington that he had broken the strike. He was wrong. It had spread to Ohio, Kentucky, and Maryland. In Baltimore the Fifth and Sixth Regiments were called out for service against the strikers outside of the city. As they marched to the railroad station they were halted by several thousand workmen who tried to prevent them from entraining. The militia fired into the crowd, killing twelve and wounding eighteen.

"Between Holiday and South Street," writes J. B. McCabe in another contemporary account, "the soldiers fired many times. There was little noise beyond that caused by the musketry fire. The firing was also brisk from South to Calvert Street. The excitement, afterward, when the dead and wounded were collected was intense."

Federal troops were sent also to Maryland and with their aid the trains began to run again. Any group of strikers who tried to halt the trains was immediately fired upon and any striker who tried to persuade a strikebreaker to join the strike's ranks was immediately arrested. The strike on the Baltimore & Ohio was smashed by July 22.

But again the strike spread, this time to the Pennsylvania, the New York Central, and the Erie and increasingly to other lines until scores of thousands were on strike in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Texas, and California. Great numbers of strikers, miners, farmers, and unemployed crowded on the railroad tracks, preventing the trains from moving by the sheer weight of their massed numbers.

In Pittsburgh the strike against the Pennsylvania had the support even of businessmen, angry at the company because of extortionate freight rates. On July 21 Sheriff Fife read the riot act to the thousands massing on the railroad tracks but it was like reading to an ocean. The militia was called out when Tom Scott, who could make Presidents but who at that moment could not make trains move, advised giving the strikers "a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread." But the local militia refused to obey orders and instead joined the strikers.

The Philadelphia militia was sent for and as its members entrained they were heard boasting that they would clean out Pittsburgh in short order. Even the Army Journal admitted they were "spoiling for a fight." As they got off the trains and marched out of the station at Pittsburgh they were greeted by hisses and groans of a large crowd. They fired into it, killing twenty men, women and children and wounding twenty-nine. "The sight presented after the soldiers ceased firing was sickening," said The New York Herald of July 22 under the caption of "War for Wages." "Old men and boys attracted to the [scene] ... lay writhing in the agonies of death, while numbers of children were killed outright. Yellowside, the neighborhood of the scene of the conflict, was actually dotted with the dead and dying; while weeping women, cursing loudly and deeply the instruments which had made them widows, were clinging to the bleeding corpses."

Miners and steel workers came pouring in from the outskirts of the city and as night fell the immense crowd proved so menacing to the soldiers that they retreated into a roundhouse. The next morning one of the soldiers told a New York Herald reporter, "I served in the war of the Rebellion, and have seen wild fighting ... but a night of terror such as last night I never experienced before and hope to God I never will again."

He told of firing into the crowd after leaving the station and reported that several workers had "taken hold of our muskets saying, 'You would not shoot workingmen, would you?'" "Before dark," he continued, "when the dead and wounded had been carried off ... we were ordered into the roundhouse, as affording us a protection for the night. ... At dusk, peeking out of the windows of the roundhouse, we saw the wagons carrying our rations captured by the crowd. ... As the crowd in the streets was augmented with the approach of night, all thoughts of sleep were given over.

"At midnight the crowd outside ... had grown into many thousands and shots were fired at us. ... Some few men I heard made their way out of [the roundhouse] in citizen's clothes and escaped from their perilous positions. We could see long lines of cars, one after the other burning. ... The fire slowly but surely crept down on us. ... Suddenly down the grade came one car after another laden with oil which was on fire and burning fiercely. ... The heat was so intense that we were obliged to retire from the windows and gather in the center of the building. ...

"It was better to run the risk of being shot down than burned to death, and so we filed out in a compact body. ... It was lively times I tell you reaching the U.S. Arsenal. ... I thought we should be all cut to pieces."

It was then that the New York World, under the headline "Pittsburgh Sacked," reported that the city was "in the hands of men dominated by the devilish spirit of Communism." Three days later, after the railroad strike hit Chicago with a walkout on the Michigan Central, the New York Times proclaimed, "City [Chicago] in Possession of Communists." It was here that Albert R. Parsons, a handsome young Texan who dreamed and worked for a world from which poverty and persecution were forever banished, went from meeting to meeting urging the strikers to be "peaceable but firm." It was here, too, that General Sheridan's cavalry charged a group of workers, killing twelve and wounding forty.

The strike spread to the Missouri-Pacific Railroad and to St. Louis where a general strike was proclaimed under the leadership of the Workingmen's Party, which was also directing the strike in Chicago. For a week not a train moved, not a factory opened, and even most stores were closed. A Negro on a white horse, according to the St. Louis Republican, which described the strike as a revolution, had galloped from factory to factory, calling for employees to strike and they had.

St. Louis corporations were handing out pay raises and agreeing to the eight-hour day when the military arrived. Martial law was declared. The United States regulars were reinforced by state militia and armed vigilantes. Seventy-nine strike leaders were arrested, forty-four receiving jail sentences. With the crushing of the strike, the widely won pay raises and the eight-hour day went out the window.

By now the military was thoroughly mobilized, as was the business community. Overwhelming force was brought against the strikers at all points. One worker declared "We were shot back to work." By August 2 the strike was broken everywhere. Under the shadow of bayonets the strikers trudged back to roundhouses, freight and switchyards. Somehow they were not downhearted at all and there was a good deal of laughter and joking as they climbed aboard freight and passenger trains. Without any organization they had fought with bravery and skill and the country had been behind them. The strike had been as solid as it was spontaneous. There had been few desertions and few scabs. Next time, they said, they would have a strong union and adequate organization. Next time they would win.

The railroad strike of 1877 was a symptom of the depression, a symbol of the temper of the American people, even more than it was a contest over wages. Farmers, hating Wall Street and eager for currency reforms, had supplied strikers with food when they did not themselves stream to trouble points and the unemployed were everywhere evident. The unrest continued after the strike, expressed this time in the workers' political parties and the Greenback movements of the farmers which were springing up all over the country.

The two movements were merging in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York as early as 1877 and in the following year they put a national ticket into the field. In the fall of 1878 some 1,000,000 votes were cast for Greenback-Labor candidates for Congress, fifteen of whom were elected, six from the East, six from the Midwest, and three from the South. The Congressional vote for Greenback-Labor candidates in Pennsylvania was almost 100,000, 14 percent of the total vote, and the largest part of it came from the so-called Molly Maguire counties in anthracite.

Again the miners were organizing in Schuylkill County, joining the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 but only now beginning to grow on a nationwide basis. To make matters worse, Terence V. Powderly, soon to be Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, was elected Mayor of Scranton on what was known as the "Molly Maguire ticket."

Gowen's work was rapidly being undone and the anthracite monopoly he had created was crumbling. He had destroyed the miners' union and there it was again, demanding negotiations with as much spirit as if the nineteen had never been hanged. The Philadelphia and Reading was in bankruptcy, Morgan taking over in the reorganization, one of his representatives declaring that Gowen was "a Napoleon being banished to St. Helena." He added, "The trouble with Mr. Gowen is that he wants to be fighting all the time. When he was after the Molly Maguires he was in his element but as a railroad manager he is a failure."

Stripped of his railroad, his mines, and activity by Morgan, Gowen sank into so deep a gloom that friends feared for his sanity. He could not stand the word "failure" but he heard it frequently now. The old magic that had always been his was gone and when he asked for new capital to fight Morgan he was met with silence or evasion. No longer did he enjoy his limericks and when he called on the charm that once had never failed him there was no response.

On Dec. 13, 1889, Gowen shot himself through the head.