![]() ![]() Officials and newspaper accounts had many words to describe the Great Upheaval: Insurrection! Rebellion! Revolt! Allan Pinkerton called it a “monster riot” in his 1878 book Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives. They were genuinely concerned about a second civil war - this time with foreign-born socialists and communists at the forefront of a war on the oligarchy. ![]() Business owners dreaded the possibility of an American version of the Paris Commune, which shocked Europe just six years prior. In Pittsburgh, trains and rail yards were set ablaze, and in St Louis, a coalition of organized strikers - the St Louis Commune - took power for about twenty-four hours. The capitalist class was genuinely concerned about a second civil war - this time with foreign-born socialists and communists at the forefront. Others walked off the job in solidarity, including miners and boatmen in West Virginia, box makers in Baltimore, and butchers in Chicago. The strikers were not just railroad workers. The strike migrated east to west along significant rail routes in the North. They demanded a 10 percent raise instead, and began uncoupling train cars to keep them at a standstill. The aforementioned Martinsburg railroad workers, who unintentionally kicked off the Great Upheaval, struck on July 16 in reaction to their third pay cut that year. Shareholders and managers did just fine, but ordinary workers’ pay was cut by up to half. ![]() The situation reached a boiling point in 1877, as railroad magnates colluded to slash workers’ wages twice, despite raking in huge profits. enduring a tyranny compared with which British taxation in colonial days was as nothing, and of which the crack of the slave whip is only a fair type?” published the Journal of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers in 1873. Their robber baron bosses kept whittling down workers’ salaries after the Panic of 1873, the worst financial depression in American history until that point. Unions were a marginal force in rapidly industrializing cities in the North, and laborers endured long hours and starvation-level wages, with few rights on the job. The so-called labor question had supplanted slavery as the dominant moral crisis of Reconstruction-era America. This was the Gilded Age, a sardonic turn of phrase coined by Mark Twain to describe the moral bankruptcy of the political and financial elite who were getting unfathomably wealthy on the backs of workers thanks to turbocharged capitalism. The summer of 1877 was not a great time to be working on the railroad all the livelong day. In response to the work stoppages, capital waged a class war against labor with an organized and violent show of force not seen since the Civil War. It was no accident that Marx’s prediction didn’t quite pan out. Writing to Friedrich Engels on July 24 of that year, Karl Marx called it “the first uprising against the oligarchy of capital which had developed since the Civil War,” which could lead to a “serious workers’ party in the United States.” By the end of the month, one million workers had stopped working in industrial cities across fourteen states, from New York City to San Francisco. That single event had a domino effect, spreading rebellion like wildfire among America’s working class. On July 16, 1877, forty railroad workers responded to news of a pay cut by stopping work and shutting down rail traffic in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The first nationwide strike in United States history began humbly enough.
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