1877 Insurrection: Excerpt from THE AGE OF BETRAYAL: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900
http://yinsurgent.wordpress.com/2007/07/08/1877-insurrection-excerpt-from-the-age-of-betrayal-the-triumph-of-money-in-america-1865-1900/
The Post Gazette Editors were kind enough to publish this bit from Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 by Jack Beatty.
It’s worth checking out for the pictures, alone.
I wished I’d have copied this rather than the version on the ‘about this picture‘ page.
Maybe this’ll get the Yinsurrectionary Times its first ‘cease and desist’ order? Maybe including a link to but the book offers some protection?
WORKERS MUST CHOOSE BETWEEN FIGHTING OR EATING
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, “the largest strike anywhere in the world in the 19th century,” according to one historian, was the social earthquake of the Gilded Age, bursting post-Civil War illusions of American immunity to European-style class conflict. To keep afloat during the long depression of the 1870s, the railroads first engaged in wasting rate wars; then, to recoup their losses, colluded to cut wages to $1 a day, beginning July 1, 1877. The Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that $1 a day represented “absolute poverty.”The strike reached Pittsburgh on the morning of Thursday, July 19, when an announcement from Pennsylvania Railroad Superintendent Robert Pitcairn was posted that said all eastbound trains would “henceforth” be doubleheaders. That is, the length of the trains would be doubled without increasing the size of the crew, costing jobs and endangering train crews.
Augustus Harris, a flagman, refused to go out on the first doubleheader. A brakeman joined him. Yardmen joined them. When a brakeman, following his supervisor’s orders, started to couple a car to an engine, the strikers threw coupling pins, injuring him and making him run for his life. Engineers were warned: Stay away from the trains.
“Hice, you have a perfect right to refuse to go out,” trainmaster David Garrett told Andrew Hice and a score of strikers, “but you have no right to interfere with others.”
“It is a question of blood or bread,” Mr. Hice came back, “and if I can go to the penitentiary I can get bread and water, and that is about all I can get now.”
After a crowd blocked the eastbound switch at the 28th Street crossing in what is now the Strip District, all traffic stopped. Superintendent Pitcairn departed for Philadelphia, leaving his chief clerk, David Watt, in charge. Mr. Watt applied to Mayor William McCarthy for help, but Mr. McCarthy had no will for that. Squeezing Pittsburgh for decades, the Pennsylvania Railroad had incurred the city’s enmity.
“From the first commencement of the strike,” the Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Railroad Riots found, “the strikers had the active sympathy of a large portion of the people of Pittsburgh.”
The mayor could spare no men; budget cuts had winnowed his day police force to 11 men. Mr. Watt could ask for volunteers among the laid-off policemen milling in City Hall awaiting their last paychecks. Ten came forward. Mr. Watt led them up Liberty Street toward the switch at the crossing.
Wading into the crowd he declared, “I’ll turn that switch,” and strode toward it. A striker stepped in front of him. Mr. Watt took the man by the coat, at which a fist “shot out” and struck Mr. Watt in the eye. The police pursued the puncher, the crowd neither resisting nor cooperating. Boys threw stones. Dispatcher Joseph McCabe turned the switch. A freight train pulled out of the yard, the last for three weeks.
THE PHILADELPHIANS INVADE PITTSBURGH
In charge at the Philadelphia headquarters of the Pennsylvania Railroad on July 19 was third vice president Alexander Cassatt, a well-born Philadelphian and older brother of the painter Mary Cassatt. Reports of the trainmen’s walkout reached Mr. Cassatt late in the afternoon. After telegraphing the Pittsburgh office to replace the strikers with “extra conductors and engineers,” he left for Cheswold, the neo-Gothic mansion on the Main Line in Haverford he had commissioned in 1872.When most Americans used an outdoor privy during the day and a chamber pot at night and five out of six city dwellers still bathed with pail and sponge, Cheswold boasted seven bathrooms. Mr. Cassatt was having dinner with his wife and three children when the station master at Haverford arrived with news that a rough had blacked David Watt’s eye and strikers had stopped all traffic.
When the Trainmen’s Union representatives passed their list of demands to Superintendent Pitcairn in Philadelphia on Friday morning, he handed it to Mr. Cassatt, now in charge. Mr. Cassatt read it — the union mainly wanted the wage cut rescinded and the double-headers cancelled — and handed the list back. “Have no further talk with them,” he instructed Mr. Pitcairn. “They’ve asked for things we can’t grant them at all.” Knowing that Gov. John B. Hartranft, vacationing in Wyoming in a luxurious private car supplied by Mr. Cassatt’s railroad, had called out the National Guard, he felt no need to bargain.
By late afternoon, Gen. Alfred L. Pearson, the commander of the Pittsburgh-based 6th Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard, had mustered only 130 men, a force too small, he told Mr. Cassatt, to disperse the crowd. A cannonade would do it — he had two artillery pieces — but at an unacceptable cost in lives. Mr. Cassatt said he was prepared to pay the price.
Gen. Pearson, a Medal of Honor winner in the Civil War, doubted that his regiment would fire on “their fellow townsmen.” Mr. Cassatt suggested that Gov. Hartranft’s Adj. Gen. James W. Latta “had a good regiment under arms” in Philadelphia; a special train could bring them to Pittsburgh overnight. They would shoot, if they had to. Gen. Pearson wired Gen. Latta that “to avert bloodshed, we should have not less than two thousand troops.”
In a decision a Pittsburgh paper branded “insane,” Gen. Latta called out the 1st Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard under Maj. Gen. Robert M. Brinton. Bad blood between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia extended back decades, to the founding of the Pennsylvania Railroad by “Philadelphia capitalists” and their campaign to keep competitors out of Pittsburgh. How Pittsburghers would react to Philadelphia militia marching through their streets to break a broadly supported strike against the hated Pennsylvania Railroad was foreseeable but not foreseen.
That evening the Philadelphia depot thronged with soldiers and their families. Of 1,200 troops in the division, Brinton’s summons had reached a little over 600. In cars bearing the marks of stonings by strikers in Harrisburg, Johnstown and Altoona, the Philadelphia militia pulled past 28th Street in Pittsburgh early Saturday afternoon, their long polished Springfield rifles sticking out the broken windows.
PITTSBURGH FIGHTS BACK AS BLOOD RUNS IN THE STREETS
The Philadelphians were “spoiling for a fight,” the Army Times later reported, boasting en route they would “clean up Pittsburgh.” They marched up the tracks toward the 28th Street crossing, two Gatling guns pulled bumpily along behind. From a parallel street “wild and famished looking women” hissed at them. Bobbing along the tops of the cars on the adjacent track, Alexander Cassatt’s tall white hat was visible.As they gained the crossing, the Philadelphians saw they were marching into a tight spot. A steep hill ran up from the tracks on one side. Four coal cars wedged them in on the other, with “spectators” covering the coal. Spread out on the hill were lawyers and businessmen there out of curiosity, families with small children, trainmen, millmen, miners and the remnants of the Pittsburgh militia.
Ordered to occupy the crossing during the night, by midday some of the Pittsburgh militiamen had melted into the crowd; others stacked their arms and sat on the hill with their friends or families. The crowd blocking the tracks numbered “seven to eight thousand.” The Philadelphians, having split their force to guard facilities closer to the depot, were three hundred.
They deployed in a hollow square, facing the Gatlings at the thickest knot of people a few paces down the tracks. A detachment of the “Dark Blues” lowered their rifles and charged the crowd with their bayonets. Men grabbed at the bayonets and tried to pull the rifles away from the soldiers. One “retained his piece by using his bayonet, and my impression is he run the man through,” a militiaman recalled.
From the hill boys threw stones. From the coal cars came a barrage of coal. Mr. Pitcairn, in the center of the square, said coal “clouded the horizon.” A soldier “had the whole side of his face taken off by a brick.” Others collapsed from sunstroke. “Shoot, you sons of bitches, won’t you shoot!,” a voice taunted.
The crowd surged around the Dark Blues. At least three pistol shots, one from a boy on the hill, rang out. No one gave the order, but up and down the square the militiamen opened fire, at first in all directions, then at the hillside. A reporter for the Pittsburgh Post described the scene on the hill: “Women and children rushed frantically about, some seeking safety, others calling for friends and relatives. Strong men halted with fear, and trembling with excitement, rushed madly to and fro, tramping upon the killed and wounded as well as those who had dropped to Mother Earth to escape injury and death.”
Five minutes of shooting, two or three shots a second, had left 17 dead and 60 or 70 wounded. The casualties included at least one woman, a Pittsburgh militiaman, an old man and a four-year-old girl pulled from the line of fire by a lawyer who tourniqueted her shattered knee with his handkerchief. That night the doctors amputated her leg in vain.
THE CITY IS DEVASTATED AND THE BILL COMES DUE
“FIRST BLOOD: Seventeen Citizens Shot in Cold Blood by the Roughs of Philadelphia; The Lexington of the Labor Conflict at Hand” read the headline in the Sunday Pittsburgh Gazette.Rather than stay in the crossing and be overrun by a crowd that swelled as the news of what they had done spread, the Philadelphians took refuge in the 26th Street roundhouse. They were fired on throughout the night by rifles and shotguns their attackers had stolen from a local gun shop. Toward morning rioters ran a burning coke car topped with petroleum into the buildings adjacent to the roundhouse. Its roof caught fire. At the thought of the Philadelphians burning alive the mob let out a “savage, prolonged yell of exultation.”
Soon men began gagging on the smoke. Before the roof fell in, Gen. Brinton ordered them to evacuate. These factory workers and clerks far from their Philadelphia homes then formed up, one Gatling gun in front, another in the rear, and at a little past 8 marched out of the yards.
The sight of the Gatlings panicked the crowd, which rushed for the alleys running off Liberty Street. As the troops passed, “pistols blazed at them out of doorways and windows, from behind corners, projecting signs, crates and boxes, from cellars and other places,” and even from a police station. Caring people took the wounded into their homes, and lied for them when gunmen, looking for soldiers to kill, rapped on the door. When their pursuers switched to rifles, the Philadelphians fired back, wounding a nonstriking railroad mechanic returning from work and a plasterer and killing a saloonkeeper standing in his own door.
Approaching the Allegheny Arsenal, a major arms depot for the U. S. Army, the Philadelphians were turned away. Afraid that if he harbored Gen. Brinton’s men the crowd would storm the arsenal and make off with its 36,000 rifles and muskets, its cannon and powder magazine, the commander accepted only the wounded. With his troops low on ammunition and without food or water for 24 hours, Gen. Brinton decided not to fight his way to the depot but to march the Philadelphians out of Pittsburgh via the high bridge over the Allegheny River to Sharpsburg, camping on the grounds of the local workhouse.
The crowd now ruled the city. “Vengeance means retaliation,” Barrington Moore, Jr. observed. “It also means a reassertion of human dignity or worth, after injury or damage.”
Saturday night and Sunday, a few outraged Pittsburghers reasserted their dignity against the Pennsylvania Railroad, burning 1,200 freight cars, 104 engines, 46 passenger cars and all 39 company buildings in Pittsburgh, including the Union Depot and hotel. According to Carroll Wright, the first U.S. commissioner of labor, “a great many old freight cars which must soon be replaced by new, were pushed into the fires by agents of the railroad company … and of course the loss was included in claims on the county of Allegheny.”
The tax-paying rioters would have to pay for the damage. The committee investigating the riot found that “the actual destruction was participated in by only 30 to 50 men.” Photographs of the train yards reveal a wilderness of twisted metal and fallen brick extending two miles, not so much resembling Lexington as Berlin circa 1945.
“No parallel in the history of the world upon the strength of what we saw,” Adj. Gen. Latta wired Gov. Hartranft. “A crowd setting fire to something feels irresistible; so long as the fire spreads, everyone will join in and everything hostile will be destroyed,” Elias Canetti wrote in “Crowds and Power.”
And so it was in Pittsburgh. “The strike is over,” a New York Times correspondent wrote on Sunday night, “for there is nothing here to strike against so far as the Pennsylvania Railroad is concerned.”
(Excerpted from “THE AGE OF BETRAYAL: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900.” By Jack Beatty. Copyright (C) 2007 by Jack Beatty. Recently published by Alfred A. Knopf.)
