How did the great railroad strike of 1877 demonstrate the power of workers?

This year, U.S. media has closely covered a topic it usually pays relatively little attention to — railroad unions. Railroad workers have long been frustrated by the absence of decent sick leave. Then the COVID-19 pandemic made a bad situation untenable. Workers in different unions threatened to strike, which would disrupt already fragile supply chains. Even after the Biden administration intervened this summer to negotiate a deal, a number of unions rejected it because paid sick leave was still being withheld. Railroads are so vital to the economy that Congress has the legal authority through the Railway Labor Act to force the unions to accept a deal. To try and head off a filibuster, which requires 60 votes, Democrats needed Republican votes and the Senate passed a bill forcing a contract while rejecting a separate measure to guarantee paid sick leave. As it turns out, workers in the railroad sector have been seeking labor justice through arbitration and negotiation for more than a century. So how are we here, yet again?

Labor activism and the railways are inextricably linked in US history. In 1877, railroad workers were fighting for labor justice too. Years of pay cuts, weak labor protections, and ruthless exploitation by their employers led them to walk off their jobs in a series of strikes across the country. They were joined by workers in a host of different industries, many out of sympathy, anger with the railroads, or a sense of class solidarity. The strikes of 1877 were a pivotal moment, both for workers and for capital. We take a look back at how it unfolded.

In the 19th century, labor unions occupied a very precarious place in US society. As the economy industrialized and workplaces scaled up, workers sometimes tried to come together to collectively demand better wages and shorter working hours. Until 1842, workers who tried these tactics could be charged with criminal conspiracy, but that year the Massachusetts Supreme Court established in Commonwealth v. Hunt that unions were legal and that peaceful tactics such as strikes were legal too. 

The unions that arose in the wake of Commonwealth were craft-based, meaning that members performed a specific task in a specific industry. “They were primarily skilled laborers, primarily white, native-born men, and kind of organized along old guild lines. Industrialization begins to change that after the Civil War, as workers find themselves and their work reorganized factory production,” John Lloyd, Ph.D., and professor of history at Cal Poly Pomona, tells Teen Vogue. These were often idiosyncratic groups that looked more like secret societies or social clubs. Members of the Knights of Labor were “baptized” into the organization and swore a sacred oath to “rescue the toiler from the grasp of the selfish.” They had names like the United Sons of Vulcan (representing puddlers, or people who worked with pig iron) or the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin (representing shoemakers). These unions were often anti-technology as it related to their jobs. The Knights of St. Crispin were incredibly wary of machinery that they feared would make their jobs obsolete and tried to insist that only union members could operate them. These were also distinctly regional. The first attempt to make a national union was short-lived. 

At the same time that labor unions were finding a degree of legitimacy, railroads were proliferating across the United States. The first railway in the United States, the Baltimore & Ohio, was chartered in 1827. By 1840, 2,800 miles of track had been laid. By 1860, that number had grown to 30,000 and it was up to 100,000 by 1881. The railroad reshaped whole swaths of the American economy, both for farmers who could suddenly ship crops rapidly and from remote parts of the country, and for the metalworkers and other laborers who supported the flourishing rail industry. 

Railroads could be tremendously profitable, but they could also be tremendously unstable financially. Rail companies frequently required generous subsidies and bonds from the government in order to function. Construction through land grants also transformed them into large landholders. Even with that support, many including the famous transcontinental railroad were still not profitable as they were located in areas where there was too little freight traffic or travel to turn a profit. Investment firms and banks took on investments in search of profits that drove them deeply into debt.

In 1873, when a major railroad financier, Jay Cooke & Company, declared bankruptcy, it set off a chain reaction in the US economy. Seeing a large bank fail created panic as people rushed to withdraw their savings. When those banks ran out of money, they too failed, and ultimately more than 100 banks across the country collapsed. Nearly a quarter of the country’s railroads were driven into bankruptcy and with them came a host of aftershocks in other sectors of the economy. Approximately 18,000 companies were driven out of business by the Panic of 1873 and unemployment rose as high as 14%. This was the first great industrial depression, one that eventually became global.

The railroads that survived the initial panic did so in part by cutting workers' wages. According to Lloyd, “Some estimates have put real wages dropping by as much as 50% across the country in the 1870s.” Companies found other ways to try and squeeze productivity from labor. “When a train would reach a destination, they often had a layover, sometimes of several days, where they would have to wait for the company to have a train to send them back in the other direction. During this layover period, they were on their own. The company wouldn’t pay wages and they had to pay all their own expenses,” Lloyd continued.

The precipitating event for the Strike of 1877 was a 10% pay cut announced by the Baltimore & Ohio railroad. It was the second such pay cut for workers in eight months. On July 14, 1877, workers in West Virginia refused to work, occupied the railyard, and refused to allow trains to leave. When the governor of West Virginia sent the state militia to force the strikers out, militia members refused to intervene — and the strikes began to spread. They followed the rail lines, breaking out in Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, then spreading west to Chicago and St. Louis. With very little communication or coordination, approximately 100,000 workers around the country simply stopped working.

“There had been strikes in the United States prior to 1877, but they were mostly localized and on a much smaller scale. This is the first nationwide strike in US history,” Lloyd explained. Moreover, striking railroad workers were joined by people in other industries who walked off the job in solidarity. Many of them were frustrated with their own working conditions or angry with other railroad companies. Whatever the reasons, rail traffic virtually ground to a halt almost immediately in the affected cities, costing railroad companies and the economy millions of dollars in one swoop.

There were deeper fears at play too, especially among businessmen and politicians. A few years earlier in 1871, workers and socialists in Paris had temporarily seized control of the city in order to prevent a feared reimposition of the monarchy. Many participants had hoped that what came to be known as the Paris Commune marked the beginning of socialism in France. Ultimately, the uprising was crushed by French troops, but in the United States, there was a great deal of fear that similar protests in the US could be the prelude to a socialist revolution. 

Workers displayed an unprecedented degree of militancy, especially in certain cities, as Ed Simon details in An Alternative History of Pittsburgh. Strikers in Pittsburgh ended up fighting with federal troops and burning buildings when attempts were made to forcibly disperse them and dozens of people were killed. In St. Louis, members of the Marxist Workingmen’s Party went so far as to operate the passenger rails themselves and they kept the fares. Breaking up the strikes with police or even local militia proved to be challenging in certain cities because too many officers sympathized with the strikers. Politicians often had to bring militia from elsewhere or federal troops in to break up the strikes. “It’s really this escalation of the use of force that sets 1877 apart in a lot of ways,” Shannon Smith, Ph.D., and professor of history at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University told Teen Vogue. 

Eventually, the Strike of 1877 ran out of steam. Within 45 days, all of the strikes had come to an end. As a spontaneous uprising, there wasn't any national coordination and the strikes were resolved, either peacefully or violently, in individual cities. “Capital” — that is,  business interests— “learned the lesson that they could ask the government for assistance and that it was in the best interest of the government to keep industrialists happy because they wielded so much power,” Smith explained. “Pretty soon, workers or unionists are saying, ‘You can’t be in the union and join the militia because the militia is the tool of government.’” This, in turn, set the stage for ongoing distrust and conflict between these groups, according to Smith, by eroding workers’ faith that the government would intervene on their behalf.

For labor, the lesson learned from the Strike of 1877 was the need for national leadership and more organization. “Nationally, railroad workers got very little,” Smith explained. Even in places like Cleveland, where the strikes were peaceful and some of the strikers’ demands were recognized, they were ultimately rejected because railroad executives simply refused to honor the agreement. Attention turned to a relatively new national union, the Knights of Labor. It too only survived for a few years before declining in the 1880s, but it was quickly succeeded by the American Federation of Labor, which still exists today. According to Lloyd, Eugene Debs, a founding member of the Socialist Party of America and the International Workers of the World, heeded a similar lesson: “Eugene Debs during the strike of 1877 was a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in his hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana…Terre Haute was spared a lot of the violence of the strike, but he was aware of it and it influences his efforts to create a national railroad union.” Debs focused on creating a national railway labor union in the  1890s, but in the long run, his interest was in socialism. 

The battles that were fought in 1877 are still being fought today. The seemingly sudden upsurge in labor militancy after the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic might seem familiar. Railroads might not be the revolutionary technology they were in the 19th century, but they’re just as fundamental to the economy — and just as vulnerable to organized worker power.

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