Download The Haymarket Square Riot (1886)

Cigar Makers International Union (1874)
The first organization to use the “union” label.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877
During the Civil War, in Locust Gap, PA, the Miners’ Benevolent Society was formed.
It was one of the first unions in America and was formed to provide accident insurance to
its members and to demand better pay. There was an economic depression in 1873
caused by over-investing by RR and coal mine owners, particularly Frank Gowen, who
owned the Reading RR. In 1875, Reading RR lowered its employees’ wages to 54% of
their 1869 level, setting off the “Long Strike” of 1875. But the owners had enough coal
stored to outlast the miners, and they fired all the union members. The strike was
unsuccessful.
In 1877, there was labor unrest throughout the country. In July, after RR owners
conspired to lower wages even further, the trainmen in Baltimore learned of the
conspiracy and announced a strike. More than 80,000 trainmen and 500,000 other
workers, from Boston to Kansas City, joined the strike despite there being no formal
national unions. In Pittsburgh, the RR owners brought in the National Guard, who shot
26 unarmed strikers and bystanders, prompting vengeful crowds to burn 3 miles of RR
cars. In Reading, when striking miners blocked the tracks, Reading RR’s owners called
in the Guard. Folks threw some bricks at them, whereupon the Guard opened fire in all
directions, killing 10 people and wounding 40, including 5 local policemen. Nationwide,
the RR owners used police, vigilantes and the National Guard to crush the strike, and
more than 100 people were killed. The Great Railway Strike of 1877 was America’s
first nationwide strike.
There was a lot of anti-immigrant – and particularly anti-Irish – sentiment in the country
at the time. Irish Catholic mine workers were accused of being members of the “Molly
Maguires” – an alleged secret society whose members were said to be conspiring to kill
mine owners. Reading RR’s owners used the prevailing prejudice to distract people’s
attention away from the workers’ complaints. They hired their own policemen to
investigate, and the company’s lawyers to prosecute suspects. Despite strong evidence of
their complete innocence, 10 to 20 (depending on whose account one believes) so-called
“Molly Maguires” were executed by hanging beginning in June, 1877.
1st Labor Day Celebration (1882) In New York City
The Foran Act (1885)
Also known as the Alien Contract Labor Act, it prohibited the use of contract labor in
the U.S. In a period of restrictive immigration, it also served the interests of laborers and
unions because it banned the immigration of laborers brought in to break strikes.
The Haymarket Square Riot (1886)
A labor rally was held in Chicago in support of the 8 hour workday (which had been
Illinois state law since 1867, but wasn’t effectively enforced). There was a crowd of
about 1500 people at the rally, most just curious onlookers. The police tried to disperse
the crowd and a bomb went off. The police opened fire on the crowd. Seven policemen
and four others were killed, and over 100 people were wounded. Eight people – the selfstyled “anarchists” who had announced the gathering – were tried and convicted of
“incitement to violence,” even though no evidence was produced that any of them had
any knowledge of any bomb or the bomber. Four were hanged and one committed
suicide. The other three went to prison for seven years before they were pardoned by
Governor John Altgeld, who stated that the trial had been “patently unjust.” The event
marked the beginning of the decline of the labor organization, the Knights of Labor,
which was blamed for the riot although it had had nothing to do with the gathering.
The Homestead Strike (1892)
A strike by workers at Andrew Carnegie’s steel plant in Homestead, PA. There was a
general country-wide economic downturn following the Civil War. In 1890, the price of
rolled steel dropped. Henry Frick, the gen’l mgr of the Homestead plant that Carnegie
owned, set out to break the power of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel
Workers, which at the time was one of the most powerful craft unions in America. Frick
had large stocks produced before the union’s contract expired in June, 1892. He was
instructed by Carnegie to close the plant if the workers refused the terms offered, and to
try to wait them out. When the contract expired, Frick tried to cut wages. When the
union balked, he closed the plant and locked out the workers. He announced that he
would no longer negotiate with the union, only with individual workers. He built a fence
topped with barbed wire and with peepholes for rifles around the plant. He hired
Pinkerton detectives and tried unsuccessfully to have them shipped in by barges in the
middle of the night. A gun battled ensued in which 12 workers and Pinkertons were
killed. The workers beat back the Pinkertons, but the governor of PA called in the state
militia and they took over the plant. Strikebreakers were brought in, and the workers
could not continue indefinitely to hold out. Some of them returned to work, but the union
leaders were blacklisted and could not get jobs in any steel mill around. The leaders of
the strike and many of the workers were arrested, some charged with murder. The
workers’ Strike Committee members were arrested and charged with treason. (None of
them were ever convicted.) The union was defeated and lost all its power to negotiate
with the Pittsburgh area steel mills.
The Pullman Boycott (1894)
The American Railway Union, founded by Eugene V. Debs, joined the strike which had
begun in May against the Pullman Palace Car Company by its employees. Factory
workers had walked off their jobs after failing to negotiate a halt in the decline of wages.
In late June, the ARU gave notice that its members would not work on any trains that
were pulling Pullman cars (hence the term “boycott”). Trains across the U.S. ground to a
halt, and the federal government decided it had to intervene. In July, the government
issued an injunction forbidding the strike, then sent soldiers to Chicago and other cities to
enforce the injunction. Debs was arrested and thrown in prison for violating the
injunction. By mid-July, the strike was over and the ARU was broken. The U.S.
Supreme Court upheld the use of injunctions in 1895 (case of In re Debs) and the trains
began running again, but George Pullman was criticized for refusing to arbitrate the
wage issues and there was a lot of public sympathy for the workers and their unions.
The American Federation of Labor
In 1886, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions re-organized as the
American Federation of Labor. Samuel F. Gompers, president of the Cigar Makers’
International Union in New York City, was elected its first president. He served in that
capacity for almost 4 decades. He promoted trade unionism, which grouped skilled
workers into local unions (“locals”) on the basis of their trade or craft, which contrasted
with the approach of the Knights of Labor, which had tried to organize communityfocused unions which would include employers and community activists, as well as wage
earners. He strenuously opposed employers’ attempts to use the new antitrust laws of
the early 1900s against unions, and as part of that effort, encouraged union members to
join together to elect political officials who were labor-friendly. During WWI, Woodrow
Wilson appointed Gompers to the Council of National Defense, in order to get his active
support for the mobilization of laborers for the war effort.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations
Many workers were frustrated with the long-standing refusal of the AFL to try to
organize and represent the interests of unskilled laborers, who had plenty of complaints
of their own. Union leaders, including John L. Lewis (President of the United Mine
Workers), founded the Committee for Industrial Organization in 1935, which name
changed in 1938 to the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It was the heart of the
Great Depression, and the time was ripe for unionization, despite the often-violent
opposition of owners and managers in industry. Steelworkers formed the largest group of
the CIO, followed by packing house workers, farm equipment workers, and auto workers.
Following WWII, the CIO aligned itself with the Democratic Party and purged itself of
all its members who had been radicals and Communists since the ‘30s.
The two groups merged in 1955, becoming the AFL-CIO.
National Child Labor Committee (1904)
Organization which worked for the abolition of all child labor. The NCLC hired Lewis
W. Hine to photographically document the working conditions of children nationwide. It
obtained the passage of one law restricting child labor (the Keating-Owen Act of 1916),
which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hammer v. Dagenhart – 1918 for
unconstitutionally trying to regulate interstate commerce in order to regulate labor
conditions. A later law (the Child Labor Tax Law), was struck down by the Court for
improperly imposing a penalty, rather than a tax, upon a business that employed child
labor (Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co. – 1922). In 1924, Congress tried unsuccessfully
to pass a constitutional amendment to ban child labor. In 1936, the Walsh-Healey Act
set safety standards, established a minimum wage, provided for overtime pay, and
regulated child labor on all federal contracts only, but it wasn’t until 1938, when
President Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act (drafted by then-Senator and
subsequent U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black) that child labor was limited
nationwide. That law was upheld in a 1941 U.S. Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Darby
Lumber Co., which specifically overruled Hammer v. Dagenhart.
Lochner v. New York (U.S. Sup. Ct.) (1905)
The Court held that the “right to free contract” was implicit in the due process clause of
the 14th Amendment. It was a 5-4 decision, in which Justices John Marshall Harlan and
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. filed dissents. The case began the Lochner Era, in which
the Supreme Court invalidated numerous state and federal statutes trying to regulate
working conditions during the first third of the 20th century. The Era is considered to
have ended with the case of West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), which upheld
minimum wage legislation enacted by the State of Washington and which came about
when Associate Justice Owen Roberts changed his position to support such regulation.
It occurred at about the time that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was threatening his
“court packing scheme” and is famously referred to as “the switch in time that saved
nine.”
Lawrence Textile Strike (1912)
Most of the 30,000 striking textile workers were recent immigrants, and 45% were
women and 12% children under 18 years of age. A new Massachusetts law reducing the
work week from 56 to 54 hours per week for women and children took effect 1/1/1912.
Unhappy mill owners announced that the reduction in the work week would apply to its
male employees, as well, and cut their paychecks (which averaged $8.76 per week) the
equivalent of 2 hours’ pay (enough to buy 3 loaves of bread), setting off the strike. The
strikers comprised more than 25 nationalities, and they sought help and advice from the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Police arrested an IWW executive board
member and the editor of the Italian socialist newspaper, Il Proletario, which was
publishing articles in support of the strike. IWW Secretary “Big Bill” Haywood and
union organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn went to Lawrence to offer their support. Strikers
were advised to remain nonviolent, despite provocation by their employers. As the strike
continued into February, families decided to send their children to stay with people in
other cities in order to save their money. On February 24, the manufacturers sent police
to the train station to try to prevent the children from leaving, and they ended up clubbing
a group of women and children on the platform. The American public was outraged, and
Congress convened a hearing on the strike. This turn of events persuaded the owners that
they should negotiate a settlement with the striking workers, and the strike was settled on
March 12. The mill owners agreed to raise the workers’ wages and not to retaliate
against the strikers.
Boston Police Strike (1919)
The first-ever strike by public safety workers, it was the largely Irish-American police
force’s attempt to obtain higher wages in the face of wartime inflation. An attempt had
been made to unionize the force in order to get not only higher wages, but shorter hours
and better working conditions. The police commissioner suspended the leaders of the
attempt from the force. Shortly thereafter, more than 1,100 officers went out on strike,
leaving only 1/4 the number of cops on the streets. Bostonians rioted, and the mayor
brought in some local militia members to restore order. Massachusetts Governor
Calvin Coolidge decided to call up the whole state militia, which show of force broke the
strike. The striking policemen were not allowed to return to their jobs, and the positions
were filled by returning servicemen from WWI. The new policemen were hired for
higher salaries, were given additional holidays, and didn’t have to pay for their uniforms.
Coolidge defended the decision to not re-hire the striking policemen by telling Samuel
Gompers (Pres. of the AFL) that “[t]here is no right to strike against the public safety by
anybody, anywhere, any time.” For this strict law and order attitude, Coolidge was
nominated to be the vice president in 1920.
A. Mitchell Palmer/ “The Red Scare”
When the troops returned home following WWI, labor unrest intensified. In 1919, steel
workers went on strike for an 8 hour workday. There were race riots in Chicago, where
many southern blacks had moved to take advantage of jobs in the meat packing industry
during the war and clashed with returning white veterans who wanted their jobs back. In
Washington state, an IWW labor organizer was grabbed by an angry group and was
castrated and hanged. The Russian revolution had Americans, already somewhat antiimmigrant, frightened of the communist movement which had attracted some American
workers, many of whom were foreign-born immigrants. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson
appointed Palmer his new attorney general. In April, the Post Office discovered 38 letter
and package bombs which had been mailed to leadiing American politicians and chiefs of
industry. An Italian anarchist accidentally blew himself up outside Palmer’s house, and
Palmer became convinced that a radical plot (a la Russia) was ready to try to topple the
government. He hired a young lawyer, J. Edgar Hoover, to enforce the provisions of the
Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918). Almost one year to the day after the
Armistice was signed ending WWI, and on the second anniversary of the October
Revolution in Russia, the “Palmer Raids” commenced. Thousands of anarchists,
radicals and communists were arrested and held without charge. Many resident aliens
were deported to Finland and Russia, including Emma Goldman, a radical activist who
had committed the sins of opposing the draft and promoting birth control. Nationwide,
more than 6,000 people were rounded up in the Raids. This was the first of the “Red
Scares” to hit America, but not the last.