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As the new postbellum railroads connected the country together,
bringing all those new resources from the West and all the cotton
from the South, they also created the first national organizations,
the first national connections between workers all across the country.
People were connected.
They actually moved with the train around the country,
seeing workers all across the different railroads.
They actually could speak-- well, not speak, of course--
but communicate through the telegraph wires that now sprawled everywhere
that the railroad went.
At the same time, these railroads were extraordinarily precarious enterprises.
Vast sums had been spent to lay all that iron
across the country, all of that steel.
Railroads very frequently went bankrupt.
Because to cover all those costs was difficult,
especially when there was competition.
And so even as the railroads boomed, wages
were cut and cut and cut over those decades of the 1860s and the 1870s.
All of this comes to a head in what is called the Great Railroad
Strike of 1877, the very first moment when
there is a burgeoning of a consciousness about workers and capital,
of labor and capital, of wage workers and capital in America.
These strikes were frequent.
They happened every year, every two years.
They flared up.
And they were pushed down by militias, or by the corporations themselves.
This particular railroad strike didn't look any different
than any other strike at the time.
But it began in a place that could only exist
when you have a network of railroads-- two miles west of Baltimore
at a junction through all the West-bound trains that would travel through there.
A choke point in this network that allowed, if that point to shut down,
shutting down all the places that were connected.
The size and scale of the railroad, the connectedness of the railroad,
was also its Achilles heel.
It was also the thing that could bring it down.
If you controlled a choke point in this network,
you controlled the entire system.
The strike began on the Baltimore-Ohio Railroad, two miles west of Baltimore.
And it quickly spread along the rail to West Virginia.
Now the company that controlled this, the B and O,
they wanted just to replace the workers.
There were other people who could run the trains instead.
And at first this was possible.
They brought in replacement workers-- that
were called scabs-- to run the trains instead.
But as this process began, people began to think
of themselves less as replacement workers than as fellow workers.
The best way to understand this is the story
of 28-year-old William Vandergriff, who stood across the tracks
in Martinsburg, West Virginia, trying to stop
a train that was operated by replacement workers.
As the train was coming out, he stood there trying to stop it,
only to be shot three times by militia men.
His arm had to be amputated and he died nine days later,
leaving behind a pregnant wife with no one to look after her,
no way to earn money.
After this incident, the B and O found it harder to find replacement workers.
It was very difficult to convince them that it was OK to shoot their friends,
to shoot fellow members of their community,
to shoot people that would but for the grace of God be them.
The Baltimore Sun described this willingness to use guns on Americans
as the quote, "arrogance of capital."
This was the recognition that there was a fundamental schism occurring
in the Second Industrial Revolution, in this moment when there was so much
inequality, so much violence to protect property, to protect railroads,
to protect those relationships between wage workers and owners.
The Baltimore Sun described the workers as "famished and wild
and declare for starvation rather than to have their people
work for reduced wages.
Better to starve outright they say, than to die by slow starvation."
One railroad worker explained the sympathy of Baltimore citizenry.
"They know what it is to bring up a family on $0.90 a day.
To live on beans and cornmeal week in and week out.
To run in debt at the stores until you cannot get trusted any longer.
To see the wife breaingk down under privation and stress.
And the children growing up sharp and fierce like wolves
day after day because they don't get enough to eat."
But the relationship between the workers and the owners was not private.
It was mediated always by the state.
The state was always willing to intervene militarily with militias
to suppress strikes in this period.
The governor of West Virginia called upon President Hayes
to quote, "suppress this insurrection."
And so the President ordered federal troops
to-- all along the lines of the B and O, starting
in Baltimore moving West-- to stop this insurrection of the workers,
to protect private property.
Using the Army to defend property, looked
very similar to using the Army to suppress the South after the Civil War.
And in fact, the same troops that were moved along the rails
to maintain federal control during Reconstruction
that were removed from the South also in 1877
were the same troops that were now used to occupy the railroad lines and rail
depots, to keep the workers from their rebellion.
After the news of this spread, there were uprisings everywhere--
but not just where the B and O went but all railroads across the country,
spreading across the many states.
But even in Baltimore where the strike had begun,
those federal troops now armed with artillery
were sent to protect the rail depot in Baltimore, that great port city.
The bells that were to bring the different militias to act
as auxiliaries to the Army rung out at exactly the wrong time.
The bells rang out at exactly when all the Baltimore's factories and workers
got off work.
So instead of going home, they went to where the strike was happening.
They went to protest the use of the Army to intervene
in private economic affairs in their view.
The workers in Baltimore and their communities
pulled out cobblestones from the street, throwing them
at the Army, who then shot into the crowd.
This use of the Army was central then in this new relationship
of capital and labor.
Everywhere that there were strikes along the railroads,
whether on the Baltimore and Ohio or on the Pennsylvania Railroad,
or any of the other railroads in America,
the Army was used to put down the strikes.
Armed militias bayoneted groups of people in Pittsburgh.
But it was more than that.
It was also special train cars, outfitted
with Gatling guns that were used to reconquer Pennsylvania
along the lines running from East to West,
retaking Altoona, Reading, and Pittsburgh.
Similar stories could be talked about all
across the country-- New York, Ohio, even in Missouri.
Saint Louis even had a very brief general strike
that overthrew all production in that town,
creating what is called the St. Louis General Strike.
Now this is only a few years after the famous Paris Commune.
And so this can be seen as a truly radical moment in American history,
the flowering of a national consciousness with thousands of people
going out-- tens of thousands of people going out
on strike all across the country, all at once in an unorganized fashion.
But it was that very lack of organization
that eventually led to the strike's demise.
Unorganized people cannot stand up to the organized power of the military,
especially when it has Gatling guns.
In the aftermath of the great strike, armories
were set up in every major city in America
to maintain this possibility of retaking it, doing urban pacification using
the state military and the federal army troops.
It was only the military that had stood between the uprising
and a general disruption of private property,
of railroads, all across the country.
The great strike in 1877 marks a new chapter--
the movement from reconstruction, which is
predominately about the reconstruction of the economy
after the end of slavery-- into a new chapter of the second Industrial
Revolution, when the primary question is that new relationship between labor
and capital.