cities of local militias that later became the National Guard. One of the major impacts of the strike was the increased presence in U.S. “So rather than siding with other workers, they sided with the company.” John’s University who has written about the 1877 strike in Louisville. Smith, a history professor at the College of St. The L&N Railroad workers “were very threatened by this idea that the Black workers were organizing, and so a lot of white workers in Louisville actually supported the company and even formed their own militia to protect railroad property,” says Shannon M. In Louisville, where white railroad workers decided not to strike, these workers ended up avoiding pay cuts by siding with the Louisville and Nashville (L&N) Railroad against a general strike by Black workers. When the 1877 strike ended, most railroad companies did not meet the demands workers had made.

Though the strike lasted for different lengths of time in different places, it was largely over by the beginning of August. “So he was basically saying this is an insurrection against the country.” “He actually used the provision of the constitution insurrections,” says Troy Rondinone, a history professor at Southern Connecticut State University and author of The Great Industrial War: Framing Class Conflict in the Media, 1865-1950. Hayes deployed federal troops to attack workers. The strike wave impacted just about every major railroad in the United States, and elected officials and railroad companies responded by deploying local and state troops and privately hired militias. In these and some other cities, the railroad strike turned into a general strike as non-railroad workers joined in to protest poor pay and working conditions. When the government sent in Philadelphia’s militia to break the strike (Pittsburgh's militia had refused), workers set fire to the roundhouse at the railroad depot while the militia was inside.įrom Pittsburgh, the 1877 railroad strike-which was really a wave of strikes-spread westward to cities like Chicago and St.

Many Pittsburgh residents felt that the company had an outsized influence in the city, and supported the railroad workers who went on strike. The Martinsburg strike started as a local labor action, but within days, it had spread to Pittsburgh, where the Pennsylvania Railroad was already highly unpopular. After the B&O Railroad cut wages, the Pennsylvania Railroad and others soon followed. Lloyd, a history professor at Cal Poly Pomona who has written about the 1877 strike in the The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History. “There’s good evidence to suggest that the railroad owners, at least informally, colluded with one another to cut workers’ pay,” says John P. It was in this desperate climate that on July 16, 1877, workers of the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad station in Martinsburg, West Virginia went on strike to protest the railroad’s pay cuts. The 1877 strike took place amid the Long Depression, an economic downturn beginning in 1873 during which wages dropped and poverty and homelessness increased. Labor Day's Railroad Strike Roots A Wave of Spontaneous Strikes Rather, its spread was a spontaneous reaction to pay cuts and poor working conditions during an economic depression. The 1877 strike was remarkable in that it involved no national-level organization. It did, however, demonstrate the key role that railroad workers played in the United States, and the power they held if they stopped working at the same time. Although workers in some cities won small gains by striking or threatening to join the strike, the 1877 uprising didn’t lead to any widespread victories for railroad workers Railroad companies and elected officials ended the strike by sending militias to attack workers, resulting in an estimated 1,000 arrests and 100 deaths. The protest involved some 100,000 workers, making it the largest in the country’s history at the time, and brought major railroad lines to a halt.

Starting in West Virginia, the strike quickly spread to other parts of the country, and even turned into a general strike in some cities. In the summer of 1877, the United States experienced its first multi-state railroad strike.

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