Railroad workers walked off the job in other states and seriously disrupted commerce in the East and Midwest. The strikes were ended within a few weeks, but not before major incidents of vandalism and violence. The Great Strike marked the first time the federal government called out troops to quell a labor dispute.
But the awareness it brought to American labor problems resonated for years. Labor organizers learned many valuable lessons from the experiences of the summer of 1877. In a sense, the scale of the activity surrounding the Great Strike indicated that there was a desire for a widespread movement to secure workers' rights.
The violent incidents were the worst civil disturbances since the Draft Riots which had brought some of the violence of the Civil War into the streets of New York City 14 years earlier. One legacy of the labor unrest in the summer of 1877 still exists in the form of landmark buildings in some American cities.
Richard B. Morris, "Andrew Jackson, Strikebreaker," American Historical Review, October 1949, pp. 54-63. 4. John L. Blackman, Jr., Presidential Seizures in Labor Disputes (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 7-8. 5. J. A. Dacus, Annals of the Great Strikes (Chicago, L. T. Palmer and Co., 1877). 6.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began with a work stoppage by railroad employees in West Virginia who were protesting a reduction in their wages. And that seemingly isolated incident quickly turned into a national movement.
The crowd erupted in a frenzy, and trains and buildings were burned. Summing it up a few days later, on July 23, 1877, the New York Tribune, one of the nation's most influential newspapers, headlined a front-page story "The Labor War.".
One legacy of the labor unrest in the summer of 1877 still exists in the form of landmark buildings in some American cities. The trend of building immense fortress-like armories was inspired by the battles between striking railroad workers and soldiers.
Railroad workers walked off the job in other states and seriously disrupted commerce in the East and Midwest. The strikes were ended within a few weeks, but not before major incidents of vandalism and violence.
The Great Strike marked the first time the federal government called out troops to quell a labor dispute. In messages sent to President Rutherford B. Hayes, local officials referred to what was happening as “an insurrection.”.
Over the course of about two weeks the strikes were ended and workers returned to their jobs.
And the work stoppages and fighting in the summer of 1877 would be a major event in the history of American labor .
In the 1890s, the threat of more violence inhibited union activity, and companies and government entities relied on the courts to suppress strikes.
The Pullman Strike of 1894 was a milestone in American labor history, as the widespread strike by railroad workers brought business to a standstill across large parts of the nation until the federal government took unprecedented action to end the strike.
As for George Pullman, the strike and the violent reaction to it forever diminished his reputation. He died of a heart attack on Oct. 18, 1897. He was buried in a Chicago cemetery and tons of concrete were poured over his grave.
Things changed dramatically with the Panic of 1893, a severe financial depression that affected the American economy. Pullman cut the wages of workers by one third, but he refused to lower the rents in the company housing.
President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to enforce the court ruling. When they arrived on July 4, 1894, riots broke out in Chicago, and 26 civilians were killed. A railroad yard was burned.
Despite growing tensions among his workers, George Pullman's vision of a paternalistic community organized around a factory fascinated the American public for a time. When Chicago hosted the Columbian Exposition, the World's Fair of 1893, international visitors flocked to see the model town created by Pullman.
The strike was an intensely bitter battle between workers and company management, as well as between two major characters, George Pullman, owner of the company making railroad passenger cars, and Eugene V. Debs, leader of the American Railway Union. The significance of the Pullman Strike was enormous.
In 1888, Congress passed a law aimed at promoting industrial peace in the railroad industry. After the Pullman strike, U.S. Commissioner of Labor Carroll D. Wright headed a group which made a colorless but honest report of the dispute.
In the 19th century, presidents, if they acted at all, tended to side with employers. Andrew Jackson became a strikebreaker in 1834 when he sent troops to the construction sites of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. 3 War Department employees operated the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad during the Civil War . 4 In the violent rail strikes of 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes sent troops to prevent obstruction of the mails. 5 Grover Cleveland used soldiers to break the Pullman strike of 1894. 6
On October 23, 1902, the 163-day anthracite coal strike ended. The following morning President Roosevelt met briefly with the commissioners and asked them to try to establish good relations between the employers and the workers in the anthracite fields. The commissioners refused to comment to reporters, and then met for almost 2 hours at Wright's office, one block from the White House. There photographers took pictures, and the room became so saturated with smoke from their flash powder it had to be aired out. After organizing and scheduling future sessions, the commissioners lunched with the President, and then began their arduous task of settling the strike. 49
The groundwork for the 1900 anthracite coal strike was laid by the unexpected results of strikes in the bituminous or soft coalfields in 1897. A depression in 1893 forced down wages and, according to a Pennsylvania legislative committee, many miners lived "like sheep in shambles." A spontaneous uprising had forced many mine owners to sign a contract with the United Mine Workers. Both sides struck a bonanza as operators raised both wages and prices. Coal companies prospered, and union membership soared from 10,000 to 115,000. 8
A great strike in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania threatened a coal famine. The President feared "untold misery . . . with the certainty of riots which might develop into social war." 1 Although he had no legal right to intervene, he sent telegrams to both sides summoning them to Washington to discuss the problem.
Newspapers reported that the President had "pigeonholed" the report because it was favorable to the miners. Wright angrily denied the charge. But Roosevelt was troubled by the accusation, and he made the report public in August of 1902. 22
The Coal Strike of 1902: Turning Point in U.S. Policy. The Federal Government, with the Commissioner of Labor in a fact finding role , acted as a 'neutral' for the first time in contributing to settlement of the bitter coal strike. On Friday, October 3, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt called a precedent-shattering meeting at ...
However, in precipitating the use of an injunction to break the strike, it opened the door to greater court involvement in limiting the effectiveness of strikes. The event also established a greater role for federal government intervention in strikes and introduced the use of the federal military in addressing strikes. The violence that resulted from the strike also temporarily reduced public support for the labour movement.
Pullman Strike, (May 11, 1894–c. July 20, 1894), in U.S. history, widespread railroad strike and boycott that severely disrupted rail traffic in the Midwest of the United States in June–July 1894. The federal government’s response to the unrest marked the first time that an injunction was used to break a strike.
One plan was to refuse to hitch Pullman cars to trains and to unhitch those that were already attached. Another idea was a boycott: ARU members would refuse to handle Pullman cars or any trains with Pullman cars until the railroads severed their ties with the Pullman Company.
By involving as many as 250,000 railroad workers on some 20 railroads, the Pullman Strike demonstrated the power of the labour movement. However, in precipitating the use of an injunction to break the strike, it opened the door to greater court involvement in limiting the effectiveness of strikes.
Responding to falling revenue during the economic depression that began in 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut more than 2,000 workers and reduced wages by 25 percent.
The federal government’s response to the unrest marked the first time that an injunction was used to break a strike. Amid the crisis, on June 28 Pres. Grover Cleveland and Congress created a national holiday, Labor Day, as a conciliatory gesture toward the American labour movement. shantytown in Chicago.
At the time of the strike, 35 percent of Pullman’s workforce was represented by the American Railway Union (ARU), which had led a successful strike against the Great Northern Railway Company in April 1894.