Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor

Introduction

Introduction There are all along the [Southwest system] roads out there a great many men who have no regard for organization or law, men of hardy spirit, energy and daring. Such men as have...taken up their homes out in the wild country...will not submit as quietly as the men they have left behind in the east. —Terence Powderly, April 11, 1886 In every well-ordered institution a code of regulations, properly understood, and truly conducted, is desirable for the good order and the success of that institution, whether it be the simple domestic family of home or the more extensive family of the railroad. —A Texas Knights of Labor Committee to railway receivers J. C. Brown and Lionel A. Sheldon, February 2, 1886 I n April 1886, national union leader Terence Powderly was in a state of utter exhaustion. The preceding weeks of labor tumult, he confided to an associate, had added “a hundred years to my life. All over...they are showering work on me just as if I had nine lives...I have had ten committees to see me to day, from everywhere.” He felt “unstrung,” as though he would “never be the same again.” Surveying the social landscape in 1886, many Americans would have understood Powderly’s emotional disarray. The events of that year seemed to many to portend social collapse. Labor protest reached a crescendo, with 610,000 workers participating in at least 1,400 strikes, more than double the scale of unrest in 1885. Intense violence marked a number of these confrontations, from the coalmines of southern 2 Introduction Pennsylvania, to the streetcar yards of New York City, to the McCormick Reaper Works and Haymarket Square in Chicago. High tide came on May 1, when 350,000 of the nation’s inhabitants joined a general walkout, demanding shorter hours. Historians call 1886 the year of “the Great Upheaval.”1 To one contemporary of the upheaval, the influential Harvard economist F. W. Taussig, one strike in particular stood out as having “the widest effects and the greatest significance.” The 1886 Southwest Strike was “an extreme case—extreme in its magnitude, extreme in its methods and the temper of the strikers.”2 The “Great Southwest Strike” effectively buried a historic labor agreement between the notorious, powerful financier Jay Gould and the nation’s first mass industrial union, the Knights of Labor. It involved one of the greatest sympathy strikes in U.S. history, a cross-racial alliance in an era of Jim Crow, scenes of anguish, resentment, and bloodshed on the streets of cities and towns across five states, and an unprecedented use of state power against striking workers. Historians looking back several generations later have, like Taussig, seen the strike as a seminal episode. Observes Leon Fink, it “shook the entire social order of the trans-Mississippi West,” galvanizing a “fierce debate over the very definition of progress and the question of whose interest it would serve.” James Green ascribes to the strike “epic significance because it raised an essential question about American freedom: When a wage earner freely contracted with an employer, did the employee agree to sacrifice his liberty in return for compensation?” The walkout’s defeat, William Forbath tells us, “turned the tide against labor” and helped to set in place “the main elements that composed” the federal courts’ repressive role in the 1894 Pullman strike.3 Although the “Great Southwest Strike” is commonly referenced in historical monographs and syntheses, this book is the first in more than sixty years to sift through the mass of evidence left behind and offer a new interpretation of its causes, trajectory, and meaning. How can it be that this conflict has no recent historian, when no shortage of scholarly attention has been spent on the Knights of Labor, the union associated with the walkout, or the other crucial railway strikes of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era—the 1877 strike, the 1888 Burlington strike, the 1894 Pullman strike, and the 1922 railway shopmen’s strike?4 The dearth of in-depth treatments is curious given the outdated and romantic character of the last book-length study of the strike, authored by 3 Introduction Ruth Allen. While Allen offered keen insights and amassed an indispensable collection of firsthand accounts, ultimately she tells the story in mythic terms as a battle between the forces of good and...