Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor

Notes

Notes Introduction The epigraph quotation from Powderley is from a draft of a letter sent to Jay Gould (Series A, Reel , Correspondence, General Master Workman, –, Terence Vincent Powderly Papers, American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. Cited hereafter as tvpp). The epigraph quotation from the Knights of Labor committee is taken from the report of the United States House of Representatives, Investigation of Labor Troubles in Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, and Illinois,  Parts, , th Congress, nd Session, Report No. , II, . . Terence Powderly to John W. Hayes, Letterbook copy, Apr. , , Series A, Reel , Correspondence, General Master Workman, –, tvpp; James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon, ), ; Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States – (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), . . F. W. Taussig, “The South-Western Strike of ,” Quarterly Journal of Economics , No.  (January ), . For a description of Taussig’s contributions to the field of economics , see Howard S. Ellis, “Frank William Taussig, –,” American Economic Review , No. . (March ), –. . Leon Fink, Workingman’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), ; Green, Death in the Haymarket, ; William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ) , . . Fink, Workingman’s Democracy; Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ); Robert Weir, Knights Unhorsed; Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ); Craig Phelan, Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor (Westport: Greenwood Press, ); David Stowell, Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Donald L. McMurry, The Great Burlington Strike of : A Case History in Labor Relations (; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ); Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, eds., The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the s: Essays on Labor and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ); Colin J. Davis, Power  Notes to Pages – at Odds: The  National Railroad Shopmen’s Strike (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ). . Ruth Allen, The Great Southwest Strike (Austin: University of Texas, Bureau of Research in the Social Sciences, ), –. For a discussion of the distinction between myth and history, see Kevin Kenny, “The Molly Maguires in Popular Culture, Journal of American Ethnic History , no.  (Summer ), –, and especially Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (; New York: Hill & Wang, ). More recently, “new western history” has rejected idealized conceptions of the West, although not without controversy. See, for example, Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ) and Larry McMurtry, “Westward Ho Hum: What the New Historians Have Done to the Old West,” New Republic,  October , –. . Two exceptions are Leon Fink’s study of labor reform politics in Kansas City, Kansas, in Workingman’s Democracy, –, and Michael Cassity’s essay on Sedalia, Missouri, in “Modernization and Social Crisis: The Knights of Labor and a Midwest Community, –,” Journal of American History , no.  (June ), –. . Gerald N. Grob, Workers and Utopia: A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement, – (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, ), –; Norman J. Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, –: A Study in Democracy (New York: Vintage Books, ), –. More recently, Craig Phelan has turned to this question in Grand Master Workman, –. For Norman Ware, the strike represented yet another instance of the Knights’ unrealistic effort to unite very different wage earners under the “producer” banner. “Restless” southwestern Knights had an “exaggerated faith in the invulnerability of the Order.” He concludes that, “blinded by optimism” and led by the “aggressive ” Irons, Gould system members looked for a reason to call the strike, a doomed effort Powderly should have ordered DA  to abandon early on. See Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, –, . . In his history of Sedalia, Missouri, a key strike town, Michael Cassity holds that local Knights quickly abandoned an effort called by a remote, even dictatorial regional body representing workers across the railway system. See “Modernization and Social Crisis: The Knights of Labor and a Midwest Community, –,” Journal of American History :  (June ), –, and Defending a Way of Life: An American Community in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, ). The following supplies a good example of the dominant view of contemporaries in the wake of the walkout: Bureau of Labor Statistics and Inspection...