An Alternative History of Pittsburgh by Ed Simon

Author:Ed Simon [Simon, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, United States, State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA), Historical Geography, Social Science, sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9781948742924
Google: d0-qzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Published: 2021-04-20T23:20:45.389953+00:00

1877

The Great Railroad Strike

When the Pennsylvania Railroad and Union Depot, situated in the Strip District, caught fire in 1877, there wasn’t doubt as to its cause. Torched by railroad workers themselves, the station was immolated as one of the more spectacular events in the violent strikes that stretched from Baltimore to Pittsburgh, from West Virginia to New York, and that would be remembered by enraged and fearful robber barons as the year that communism gained a toehold in the industrial heartland of the United States.

The Great Railroad Strike didn’t begin in Pittsburgh, and it wasn’t contained to Pittsburgh. Labor solidarity stretched from Reading and Shamokin to Scranton and Albany, as well as Syracuse and Buffalo, but Pittsburgh was where workers would fight the hardest and where state brutality would be the most marked. For forty-five days the strikers brought commerce to a halt as the nation seemed on the verge of a fullblown socialist revolution. For a brief period, the city was in the grip of the workers, an American incarnation of the Paris Commune established by anarchists, socialists, and communists for a brief few months in 1871—or at least both detractors and supporters made that comparison. Writing with purple pen a few months after the strike ended, the St. Louis journalist J. A. Dacus opined in Annals of the Great Strikes in the United States: A Reliable History and Graphic Description of the Causes and Thrilling Events of the Labor Strikes and Riots of 1877 that “Men remembered France, and the scenes of 1789–93, and trembled as they heard the tumult increase, and saw the mighty masses of strange, grimy men, excited by passions, dark and fearful, surging along the streets.”

The upheaval started in Martinsburg, West Virginia, appropriately enough on Bastille Day. Only a few months before, the federal government betrayed the promise of Reconstruction throughout the demilitarized South. Reconstruction had enacted a radical program of racial and economic justice that went far beyond the program debated at the Pittsburgh conference in 1856. West Virginians had first rejected the slave system of their state government in Richmond, and in 1877, they rejected the system of wage slavery that increasingly dominated the economics of the Gilded Age North. A connection between the “Compromise of ’77” and the federal government’s violent reaction to the railroad strikes is not incidental. Noted by David O. Stowell in Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877, “With Reconstruction at an end, a new era of increasing conflict between labor and capital commenced.” Weeks before federal troops had been patrolling Southern states. Now, with some irony, Stowell notes that those same soldiers “massed in northern cities to help suppress rioting free white laborers and other urban residents.”

President Rutherford B. Hayes was instrumental in both Reconstruction’s demise and the government’s reaction to the strike, and as such, he was representative of the reaction against a more emancipatory politics. Such revanchism encouraged both state-sanctioned terrorism against Black Americans in the South (leading to the Great Migration northward,

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