Streets, railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877 Book

This is a fascinating bit of history. Though it is called the Great Railroad Strike, the strike of 1877 erupted in some places into a full-blown workers' strike, with workers of all industries walking out. Marx and Engels watched from Europe as it unfolded, seeing in it an early spasm of the inevitable revolution they foretold.

What Stowell unearths, though, is that something rather separate from any labor dispute was intensifying the conflict; not just the workers but the citizenry in general rose up in fury against the railroads, for most people the most glaringly obvious face of industrialization. Stowell chronicles a painful litany of miseries inflicted on cities by the railroads, which were built right on the surface of the streets through the very heart of town, where they regularly smashed children and set nearby buildings on fire, with apparent legal impunity. Freight trains came to rest in the middle of busy streets, severing one side of the street from the other, and parked there for as long as they bloody well felt like it.

So when the railroad workers met to coordinate their strike, careful to avoid any actual property damage to the railroad in their negotiations, they were dismayed to have their meetings crashed by crowds of angry townspeople with no such scruple, anxious in fact to damage the railroad by any means that chance might provide. The railroad workers planned their own disruptive tactics against the management, and against the trainloads of militia sent to put them down, but were simultaneously trying to defend the trains themselves from vandalism by the popular uprising that had followed on their coattails.

An absorbing and generally forgotten chapter of history for anyone interested in labor issues, populist organizing, the industrial revolution, et cetera. (Or just trains, of course. You know who you are.)