Crushing Strikes through the U.S. Military, 1875–1915

Abstract

In the wake of the Civil War, a triumphant Northern railroad industry aimed to bind together the entire nation with a crosshatching of railroads linking farm, factory, and city. Railroad tycoons soon ran the halls of Congress and state legislatures seeking funding for their projects. By 1873, the stock market, oversaturated with bloated railroad stock, collapsed to throw millions of men out of work. Those who remained endured wage cuts of up to 50 percent and seasonal work, and so went on strike against this assault on their livelihoods. The protest summit was reached in 1877 with the Great Railroad Strike. To enforce robber baron will, massive military force was deployed after Thomas A. Scott, CEO of the largest corporation in the world, the Pennsylvania Railroad, rigged the 1876 presidential election so a Republican president would be the one to remove federal troops occupying the South and use them to break strikes in the rest of the country and deal with Native American unrest over being forced from their lands. This article is adapted from a chapter of the author's forthcoming epic 78‐chapter history of the U.S.