Power at Odds: The 1922 National Railroad Shopmen's Strike (review)

The 1922 railroad shopmen’s strike is the last of the great nationwide strikes of American railway workers. The strike raged in the summer of 1922, enrolled more than 400,000 men at its peak, jeopardized the nation’s commerce, forced the intervention of the most powerful government and business leaders, continued to sizzle in 1923, disintegrated by 1924, but did not come to an official end until 1928. For unclear reasons, the railroad shopmen’s strike has only gained the cursory attention of scholars. To be sure, the strike occurred during a decade of defeat and retrenchment for American trade unions; labor historians generally have been drawn to more dramatic and encouraging times. More important, perhaps, the strike unfolded in scores of small, out-of-the-way shop towns. Documenting and analyzing this strike is a daunting task; for the earlier great labor upheavals on American railroads, events in a Pittsburgh or Chicago serve to tell the basic stories.

Colin Davis is to be commended for accepting and meeting the challenge. He has provided a fine account of the 1922 shopmen’s strike. While his overall narrative does not alter the paragraph coverage and outline of the strike available in textbooks, Davis has presented an engaging, well-researched and insightful blow-by-blow history that deserves the label, “definitive.” However, his study is conclusive in an institutional way. While he brings the reader to such places as Waycross, Georgia and Ogden, Utah, describes local insurgencies and violence, relates the participation of women supporters of the strikers, and deals with racial and ethnic divides (as well as class solidarities), his is not a social history of the 1922 railway shopmen’s strike. The great strength of Davis’s study lies in his treatment of the strategies of and negotiations among government officials, railroad company executives and union leaders. The glimpses of worker experience that he provides make for a glass half full, to his credit; community studies that rest on the footing he has established can now be conducted to render a complete portrait.

Railroad companies created shop towns largely in rural, divisional midway points for the maintenance and repair of locomotives and freight and passenger cars. The shopmen comprised a diverse group occupationally of machinists, boilermakers, blacksmiths, sheet metal workers, electricians, carpenters, painters, apprentices, and laborers. Craft divisions and geographical isolation proved obstacles in organization and the shopmen lagged behind operating railwaymen—locomotive engineers, firemen, brakemen, conductors, and even maintenance-of-the-way men—in the forming of unions. In 1908, leaders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) created the Railway Employees’ Department (RED) to coordinate organization of the separate craft unions in the field and to secure unified contracts covering all shopmen within and across companies. An ambitious attempt to gain system-wide agreements on the Illinois Central and railroads controlled by the Harriman financial interests met defeat in a prolonged job action between 1911—15. The forceful use of strikebreakers and injunctions manifested railroad managers’ determination to counter RED.

World War I proved the great boon to railway shopmen. Increased rail traffic and severe labor shortages provided leverage the shopmen never had before and major carriers began to enter into collective bargaining with RED. The federal government then firmly boosted the organization and fortunes of the shopworkers. Officials of the Railroad Administration, an agency established to manage the nation’s railroads during the national emergency, issued orders guaranteeing shopmen the right to form unions and set favorable wage and workplace standards that in effect constituted a national contract for them (an actual nationwide agreement would be reached and signed between the government and RED in September of 1920). Membership in the rail craft unions mushroomed accordingly and by the end of the First World War, the greater unionization of the trade had been achieved. The quickly gained success of the shopmen would serve as the backdrop for the...