‘Great Upheaval’ in 1877 sparked public sympathy

As 13 unions continue to grapple with major U.S. railroads, it’s revealing to reflect on another momentous worker rebellion 145 years ago this summer.

In 1877, 1 million workers went on strike and fought police, militia and U.S. troops from coast to coast – the first national work stoppage in U.S. history.

It started on a small, local scale, as 40 railroad workers in Martinsburg, W. Va., that July 16 reacted to their employer’s announcement of a pay cut by stopping work and shutting down rail traffic there. The powerful rail industry imposed low pay and long hours, and that year cut wages twice “despite raking in huge profits. Shareholders and managers did just fine, but ordinary workers’ pay was cut by up to half,” wrote Third Rail Magazine’s Ryan Zickgraf in Jacobin magazine.

“The strike marked the beginning of a shift in public sympathy for the workers’ plight,” he continued. “Within two years, railroad companies began introducing reforms, and trade unions started to gain a measure of cohesion and momentum, beginning with the Knights of Labor.”

But it cost workers dearly.

In Martinsburg, workers walked of the job after being told of their third pay cut that year, uncoupling train cars to bring everything to a halt, and the work stoppage spread, quickly including area miners and boatmen, factory workers in Baltimore and butchers in Chicago, Zickgraf said.

The job action also quickly turned violent. Rail yards were destroyed in Pittsburgh, and a coalition of strikers took over St. Louis for a day.

The railroad titans resorted to demanding elected officials to help, and soon local police, the National Guard and federal troops were sent to break the strike. A Martinsburg striker was killed in a shootout with a soldier, people were killed at a protest outside a Baltimore armory, and 20 strikers and bystanders were shot and killed in Pittsburgh.

“The great trouble,” the New York Times reported, “is that the people along the line of the road are thoroughly in sympathy with the strikers, and the military cannot be depended on to act against them in this emergency.”

In Chicago, workers walked out and marched through the city, and in one confrontation, police targeted strikers, wounding dozens and killing three.

The conflict continued until July 26, when Chicago police and a whole regiment of the Illinois National Guard fired thousands of people crowded into a viaduct on the southwest side.

Some 500 Irish immigrants marched along Halstead Street and initially refused to budge from a bridge. But then two U.S. Army regiments arrived at the viaduct with Gatling guns.

Confronting about 3,000 armed soldiers and police, the Chicago crowd retreated, but 30 had been killed and hundreds injured.

The nation’s Great Upheaval lasted about two weeks. Afterward, historians estimated  that U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes had commanded almost 60,000 federal troops into action in 10 states to erve the railroad’s interests. More than 100 people were killed and thousands injured.s

“It was the closest the United States has ever come to a second Civil War,” Zickgraf wrote.