The Great Labor Uprising of 1877

by Philip S. Foner

The first generalized confrontation between labor and capital in the United States, which effectively shut down the entire railway system.

Genres: History, Labor, The United States Of America, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Philip Sheldon Foner was an American labor historian and teacher. Foner was a prolific author and editor of more than 100 books.

Reviews

[Rhuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The history of organized labor is one of the blackest spots in America's Orwellian Memory Hole. Class conflict is not supposed to happen here; yet the record is full of some of the greatest domestic debacles in world industrial history. As with "race troubles," these are all the work of "communist agitators"; to one's surprise, this very term associated with the cold war is directly employed in the 1870s to describe the greatest mass workers' movement of the US. Documentary evidence that the cold war did not originate in 1945, or 1917, but is as old as the rise of American capitalism.

Philip S. Foner is a fine Marxist labor historian, and in this work he outlines the origin and development of the "Great Railroad Strike" of 1877. He also describes the origin, travails, and influence of the Workingman's Party of the United States as an incipient "vanguard" that failed to live up to potential. Only in St. Louis did mass action and party leadership coalesce into a "commune." Although he chides the executive for backing down, it's not hard to sense why: the strike's leaders must have sensed as it progressed how unstable its foundation, with no real defense force at their command as businessmen marshaled private arsenals and government troops to arrest them and crush the movement. Turning pacifist was their unsuccessful strategy to ward off final repression.

The 1877 strike shook government and capital to the roots, paving the way for "red scare" over-reaction at Haymarket, Chicago, in 1886 and long afterward. An interesting sidenote of some relevance, alluded in Foner's chronology on p. 70, is the execution of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania on June 21, 1877. The Mollies had become the cause celebre of labor; combined with the Irish origins of many Pennsylvania railroad workers, it undoubtedly helped spark the insurgency's beginning in the Alleghany region. Franklin B. Gowen, president of the Philadelphia & Reading RR, was instrumental in instigating both.

The presence of National Guard armories in American cities dates from this era and in no small part from this strike. Social conflict is largely expunged from the American record unless large constituencies demand recognition, as the civil rights movement resurrected a long history of racial strife buried by official consensus. Unfortunately, all seem united in keeping the veil drawn over America's history of class struggle, no doubt in fear of modern wage workers rediscovering their own lost battles for freedom and trying such funny ideas again.

[Marc Lichtman · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What do you think of the workers in the United States? This first eruption against the oligarchy of associated capital which has arisen since the Civil War will of course be put down, but it could quite well form the starting point for the establishment of a serious labor party in the United States. There are moreover two favorable circumstances. The policy of the new President will turn the Negroes into allies of the workers, and the large expropriations of land (especially fertile land) in favor of railway, mining, etc., companies will convert the farmers of the West, who are already very disenchanted, into allies of the workers. Thus a fine mess is in the offing over there, and transferring the center of the International to the United States might, post festum, turn out to have been a peculiarly opportune move"--Marx to Engels, July 25. 1977

It was of more than symbolic significance that some of the U.S. troops that suppressed the first major labor explosion after the Civil War were those taken from the South, where they had formerly been guarding against racist mobs. The bourgeoisie had taken Reconstruction as far as they wanted, and they resumed their normal course of making money. The fact that the country was genuinely united for the first time and the war profits made a big capitalist expansion, starting with the rail- roads possible.

And labor was finally fighting back to get a bigger share of the profits earned by their labor. This book is full of excitement, and you get to see famous labor leaders like Albert Parsons (a former Confederate soldier married to an African American woman who claimed to be of Mexican and Indian ancestry) in action. The German-American communists were divided into Marxists and Lasallians, and the Lasallians put less emphasis on the trade unions and more on elections. Marx was all for participating in elections, either as members of the Workingmen's Party of the United States or by supporting candidates of labor organizations. But getting into the unions and learning English was at the top of his list. Revolutionary Continuity Vol. 1: Marxist Leadership in the U. S., 1848-1917.

This division led some of the best people in the WPUS, like Parsons, to join the anarchists.

Anyway, anyone who doubts the potential of the US working class, when they were much more divided than they are now, should read this and much more.

Before reading this book, one might want to set the scene by reading The Civil War in the United States by Karl Marx and Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861-1877: The Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction.