Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

Th
  e deal hatched by the Republicans and Democrats was not a 
pretty one. It sent the less popular candidate to the White House 
and allowed him to fi nd jobs in Washington for a horde of dis-
placed Southern Republicans. Th
  e press was full of reports of payoff s 
involving the award of railroad franchises. Th
  e new administra-
tion soon catered to bankers and bondholders by resuming specie 
payments. Th
 ese developments confi rmed the scathing assessments 
of the most dogmatic Marxists of the Socialist Party. Th
 e bosses 
were using the two main parties as blatant spoils machines, and in 
most areas they were oblivious to the plight of the growing working 
class. To the socialists, the need for a quite new party—a farmer-
labor party—could not have been clearer. Th
 e Internationalists 
moved to form a Workers Party. Robin Archer has recently shed 
new light on why this possibility was nipped in the bud. He sees 
it as happening because of a combination of ferocious repression, 
Socialist sectarianism, and the reluctance of workers’ organizations 
to address political questions, since to do so would risk antago-
nizing the large number of religious workers with their ties to the 
existing party system.
124
 
Th
  e existing party system was diffi
  cult to beat because it adjusted 
to the threat of third parties either by stealing their slogans or by 
ganging up against them—as the Republicans and Democrats 
did with their joint slate in Illinois in the 1880s. Successful labor 
leaders were wooed as candidates by the two established parties. 
But both parties took handouts from the robber barons, with state 
assemblies becoming the pawns of railway promoters awarding 
them large tracts of public land in return for kickbacks. Th
 e state 
authorities also frequently allowed the state militia to be used as 
strike breakers. Although striking workers sometimes enjoyed pub-
lic support, the newspapers and middle class opinion easily turned 
against them. 
However, it was an employers’ off ensive and an across-the-
board 10 percent cut in rail workers’ pay that detonated the Great 
Rail Strike of 1877. Many of the rail workers were Union Army 
124 Robin 
Archer, 
Why Is Th
  ere No Labor Party in the United States?, Oxford 
2008. Th
  is carefully researched and argued study is the most provocative work 
on its theme since Mike Davis’s Prisoners of the American Dream (London 
1985) and extends the latter’s comparison of the US and Australia.
introduction  79

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veterans, and the rail companies sought to encourage their loyalty 
by issuing them uniforms and placing well-known generals on the 
board. But with this further pay cut such petty palliatives could 
no longer hold them in check. Th
  e Great Strike of 1877 has been 
described as “one of the bitterest explosions of class warfare in 
American history.”
125
 It reached inland to the great rail hubs and 
soon gripped the greater part of the North and West. Th
 ough it 
erupted three months after the ending of Reconstruction, the Great 
Strike did not come out of a blue sky. Th
  e employers had acted in a 
concerted fashion and counted on support from Washington, now 
that the political crisis had been resolved and the troops withdrawn 
from the South. Th
  e rail workers had much public sympathy, and 
their action encouraged others to down tools and take to the streets 
in urban areas.
126
 Workers in mines and steel plants joined in. Th
 e 
strike gathered momentum because some militia units were loath 
to threaten lives. One commander explained, “Meeting an enemy 
in the fi eld of battle, you go there to kill … But here you have men 
with fathers and brothers and relatives mingled in the crowd of 
rioters. Th
  e sympathy of the people, of the troops, my own sympa-
thy, was with the strikers proper. We all felt that these men were not 
receiving enough wages.”
127
 
In St. Louis, the strike, orchestrated by the Workingmen’s Party, 
an off shoot of the International, had control of the city for several 
days. Burbank reports:
Th
  e British Consul in St. Louis noted an example of how society 
was being turned upside down: on a railroad in Ohio, the strik-
ers “had taken the road into their own hands, running the trains 
and collecting the fares” and felt that they deserved praise because 
they turned over the proceeds to company offi
  cials.  Th
 e consul 
commented stiffl
  y that “it is … to be deplored that a large part of 
125  Eric Foner, Reconstruction, p. 383. For this momentous event see also 
Robert Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, New York 1959, and Philip Foner, Th e 
Great Labor Uprising of 1877, New York 1977.
126 David 
Stowell, 
Th
  e Great Strike of 1877, Urbana, IL., 2006.
127  Quoted in John P. Lloyd’s “Th
  e Strike Wave of 1877,” in Th e Encyclopedia 
of Strikes in American History, Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day and Immanuel 
Ness, eds., Armonk, NY, 2009, p. 183.
80  an unfinished revolution

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the public appear to regard such conduct as a legitimate mode of 
warfare.”
128
 
Th
  e strikers produced their own newspaper, the St. Louis Times, 
which attacked the voice of the city’s leaders:
Th
  e St. Louis Times  jeered at Th e Republican’s solemn warnings, 
quoting the phrase about the railroad men striking “at the very vitals 
of society”: on the contrary, said the Times, it was “the very vitals of 
society’ which were on strike, ‘and hungry vitals they are too!”
129
African Americans played a prominent role in the St. Louis action, 
a fact harped on by municipal authorities and the local press in their 
attacks on the strike. A report of the general meeting convoked by 
the strike leadership noted: “Th
  e chairman introduced the Negro 
speaker, whose remarks were frequently applauded.”
130
 Th
 e strike 
leadership required the authorities to enact a series of radical meas-
ures, including restoration of wage cuts and the generalization of 
the eight-hour day, but were thwarted when a Committee of Public 
Safety set up by the leading men of the city raised a militia and sent 
it to crush the rebellion and end the strike. However, the black pop-
ulation of St. Louis remained a force to be reckoned with—in 1879 
blacks fl eeing Southern repression, the “Exodusters,” were able to 
shelter in St. Louis prior to leaving for Kansas.
131
Just as the withdrawal of Federal troops abandoned the fi eld to 
semiprivate white militia in the South, so the employers in the 
North were able to pay for thousands, sometimes tens of thou-
sands, of National Guards, specially recruited “deputy marshals,” 
and Pinkerton men to break the strike, which had spread until it 
had national scope.
132
 One hundred strikers lost their lives in the 
course of the 1877 strike. Th
  e employers were also able to bring in 
128 David 
Burbank, 
Reign of the Rabble: the St. Louis General Strike of 1877, 
New York 1966, p. 64.
129  Ibid., p. 25.
130  Ibid., p. 33.
131  For the role of African Americans in the strike and later see Bryan Jack, 
Th
  e St. Louis African American Community and the Exodusters, Columbia, MO, 
2007, especially pp. 142–50.
132 Samuel 
Yellin, 
American Labor Struggles, 1877–1934, New York 1937.
introduction  81

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