In July and August 1877, a series of workers’ strikes and uprisings cascaded across the country from the railroad shops of Martinsburg, West Virginia to the cities of the Midwest and back to the anthracite coal fields of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
These labor actions were unplanned – they were reactions to years of economic depression and widespread exploitation by industrial interests in an age when labor organization was crushed with the hard hand of military force.
As the Great Railroad Strike, as it became known, spread across the US, a letter-writer in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania took up his pen and wrote a plea for the working classes and explaining the outpouring of frustration and rage that brought life on the East Coast of the United States to a screeching halt that summer:
Will you permit a man to say a few words in behalf of justice. The situation seems to be that the soul crushing corporations never know when they have touched bottom in their efforts at reduction. The most lamentable thing in connection with this affair is that when the corporations have reduced their men to the verge of starvation and beggary and the men stung by necessity, at last resolve to strikes the corporations immediately call upon the authorities to protect property and shoot them down like dogs.
They have all the laws so shaped as to operate in their favor and this has been brought about by the use of bribery and corrupt legislation. It is a damning shame that in a country like this any such scenes should occur. They are the immediate results of bad management and the grasping disposition of the corporations.
Look at the thousands of acres of coal lands now under lease which are costing these greedy monopolies millions of dollars every year, and out of which not a dollar can be realized for twenty years to come.
Do you wonder why it costs them so much to mine coal, when it requires $2 per ton profit to meet the interest of the bonded debt of one corporation alone. The Reading R. R. are seventy millions of dollars in debt for coal lands purchased and the guaranteed interest of 6 percent to most of the leased roads which form its branches, requires four million two hundred thousand dollars to pay interest alone.
This enhances the cost of coal 100%. Then again, when we look at the large salaries paid to the men who form its official force, it is astonishing. One railroad cost $140,000 for one years expense for labor, and out of this amount $90,000 went to pay its officials, and only $54,000 to pay those who actually work. Does anyone wonder that such management will bring the results we see?
And knowing and feeling the sympathy existing among the laboring classes, merchants, and soldiers, it would not be astonishing if every soldier should promptly refuse to fire a shot at his oppressed fellows, nor can we wonder that some have thus refused already.
The spirit of America cannot long thus be smothered, and once let out all the military available could not protect these corporations. In fact many of them are on the verge of bankruptcy and are anxiously awaiting for the rioters to destroy their property in the hope of securing national and State remuneration on the plea of inadequate protection.
In order to maintain these extravagant projects and splendid official salaries, the working force must be pinched and squeezed until they draw blood, and unfortunately they have drawn more this time than was good for them.
The writer would recommend that a monster meeting be called, and a petition fourteen miles long be signed by every laboring man and merchant, and sent to our Governor and President, setting forth the degrading wrongs of the strikers and the whole community, and calling upon these soulless corporations in the name of humanity, policy, and common decency, to end this trouble by agreeing to pay living prices for work, and throw up the uncalled for leases and unnecessary expense, of operating these corporations. And then they will require no military to protect property or disgrace American institutions.
Phoenix.
The day this article appeared in the Luzerne Union newspaper, August 1, 1877, striking workers and a militia unit clashed in nearby Scranton. The militia opened fire on the crowd and left four dead and as many as 50 people wounded. Federal soldiers soon arrived to maintain peace, and, in effect, to force workers back to their employers.
In the end, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 failed to make a lasting impact on workers’ wages or rights. More than two decades would pass before workers in the Coal Region would achieve mass organization to take on the coal operators.
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