Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor

Chapter 3: Hierarchy and Conflict

Hierarchy and Conflict I n 1883 Steve Brown found a job as a section man on the Missouri, Kansas & Texas. He learned how to fire an engine and worked as a fireman between 1887 and 1895. While in Mississippi on a passenger run, Brown was nearly involved in a terrible wreck. The train was running late. As Brown told it to an interviewer in the 1930s, the engineer ordered, “Boy, bear down on dat shovel,” in the hopes of beating the express train. “He don’t have to tell dis nigger to bear down on de shovel, ‘cause Ise know weuns have to make de lake sidin’ or Ise a gone nigger,” Brown recalled. However, the engineer inexplicably pulled the throttle “wide open an’ leves it thar,” placing the burden upon Brown to “make de steam to get de speed.” He had to deposit the coal more carefully than usual so as to maximize its use by the engine. The speed of the train and the low areas in the track led Brown to fear that the train would jump the track, and the rocking of the train across low spots made it difficult to feed the coal. Despite the train’s high speed, the engineer never pushed in the throttle. Just as they pulled onto the sidetrack and cleared and closed the switch, the express train “thundered by.” Brown’s achievement went unrecognized by the company. The engineer was discharged for bypassing a stop, and Brown was given a thirty-day layoff.1 Brown’s narrative reveals some aspects of railroad work. It dramatizes that the commonalities among railroad workers were also part of a context in which black and white, skilled and less skilled, occupied vastly unequal positions of power. What Brown’s story does not convey is that whites’ association between blackness and subordination did not wholly conform to reality: the unskilled labor force, which labored at the bottom of and under the supervision of an immense occupational hierarchy on the Gould Chapter 3 72 C h a p t e r 3 system, was of mixed ancestry. In 1880 in Little Rock, Arkansas, for example, it was not unusual for both whites and blacks to work as porters, car cleaners , trackmen, and laborers. Forty percent of all laborers in Dallas, Texas, in 1886 were white, and although native-born whites “avoided section work at all costs,” a number of white laborers, both native and foreign-born, worked in railroad construction crews and as section hands.2 These men, and the semiskilled men they labored with on a daily basis, indeed the mass of railroaders, stood outside of the railway trade unions. How did nonbrotherhood men relate to one another? How deeply were racial and ethnic identities felt, what forms did they take, and under what circumstances did they ebb and flow? In other words, how did these railroaders, who came from varying traditions, regard themselves?3 Divisions of race and skill were reflected in the distinct fraternal cultures that railroaders created and nurtured. The most significant and unyielding hierarchy involved race, which white railroaders, whatever their skill or background, accepted and in most cases embraced. Black men’s racial consciousness is more difficult to document, but many seemed to have seen railroad work as a means of escaping or at least mitigating the limitations that whites imposed. Much more permeable than the color line, but still significant, was the barrier between railroad brotherhood and non-brotherhood men. Brotherhood men mainly drew and guarded this line, but some semiskilled and unskilled railroaders rejected the brotherhood credo and posited their own conception of the relationship between labor and manhood. Outside of these experiences and identities stood bonded laborers—Chinese and convict workers—whose presence helped to inspire resentment and anxiety over the fate of free laborers in the post–Civil War era.4 Inside and Outside the Brotherhoods Railroaders who belonged to the major trade union brotherhoods—the Order of Railway Conductors (orc), the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (blf), and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (ble)—in many ways stood apart from those who did not. This was largely due to the course charted by these unions during the late 1870s and early 1880s. Following the great railway strike of 1877, the orc, ble, and blf struggled to attain legitimacy in the eyes of the public and railway officials by distancing their organizations from labor conflict almost entirely. They sought to [3...