THERESA A. CASE is an associate professor of history at the University of Houston - Downtown.
"...a lively account...notable contention...colorful
narrative...Case closely dissects the evidence to determine what
went wrong."--Donald W. Rogers, Central Connecticut State
University-- (10/19/2011)
"Case provides a good description of railroad workers' views of
manhood, identifying differences among those engaged in the various
tasks. This study of an important strike provides useful insight
into state intervention in labor conflict and competing conceptions
of worker masculinity during the late nineteenth century."--Stephen
H. Norwood, The Journal of Southern History-- (11/28/2011)
In The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor, Theresa Case
presents a lively account of the Knights of Labor's famous 1886
strike against finan- cier Jay Gould's southwestern railroads, the
first major study of this event since Ruth Allen's 1942 book The
Great Southwest Strike. An. associate pro-fessor of history at the
University of Houston-Downtown, Case plunges dee-ply into
manuscript collections, state and federal government publications,
trade union journals, and regional newspapers to argue that the
southwestern strike of 1886 figured centrally in the
late-nineteenth-century labor move- ment's development.Case's
notahlc s;ontention is that the 1886 strike emanated out of the
inter- play between the southwestern railroad industry's financial
fortunes and rail- road workers' class culture, not just out of a
clash between the nefarious Gould and Knights of Labor leaders. The
1870s and early 1880s were good times for Gould roads like the
Wabash, Missouri Pacific, and the Texas & Pacific. Thousands of
"boomer" railroad men built a socio-cultural hierarchy divided
between white skilled workers in the "running trades" and an array
of black, Mexican, native-born white, and European immigrant
laborers in yard and unskilled work. When the economy soured in
1884 and 1885 and overbuilt railroads responded by slashing wages
and reducing crew sizes, free labor ideology, anti-monopoly
sentiment, community sup- port, a saloon-based masculine culture,
and nearly universal hostility toward Chinese and convict laborers
all united the diverse railway workforce into a "massive yet
orderly walkout, across lines of skill and occupation" along Gould
roads and rival Union Pacific lines, producing successful strike
settle- ments and numerous new Knights of Labor assemblies,
including District Assembly (DA) 101 in Sedalia, Missouri (108).
Case thus confirms the view of Leon Fink, Kim Voss, and others that
the Knights burgeoned over the course of these strikes but adds
that organizational changes in the order portended its
downfall.
Case's colorful narrative claims that the culminating March 1886
walkout differed from previous grassroots job actions. It was a
top-down sympathy strike called by DA 101 master workman Martin
Irons and regional assem- blies to enforce previous strike
agreements. Irons summoned the strike, moreover, without consulting
the Knights national leadership under Terence Powderly.
Unfortunately, strikers got only spotty community sup- port this
time, and they lacked cooperation from skilled engineers and fire-
men. More ominously, railroad middle managers refused to arbitrate
and secured federal court injunctions against strikers on solvent
and insolvent roads alike, a prelude to the 1894 Pullman Strike. DA
101 leader Irons then gambled by widening the walkout, but violence
erupted and the strike soon collapsed.
Case closely dissects the evidence to determine what went wrong.
Contemporary congressional testimony, an some tstorians, am e
allegedly "pernicious" Irons for egging the protest into violence,
but Case finds him to have heen a cautious leader who made
misguided and desperate decisions when forces moved heyond his
control (185). Case also denies that racial divisions undermined
the strike. Like Leon Fink, she concedes that white Knights
embraced the white supremacist Redemption-era racial hierar- chy
rather than egalitarian "interracial" relations, but she contends
that they did promote separate "biracial" black assemblies to
achieve worker unity across skill lines, a strategy that met
considerable success (136).3 Her characterization of this policy as
a defiance of "Jim Crow," however, confuses the fluid racial
atmosphere of the post-Reconstruction era with the rigid seg-
regation of the post-1890 period.Case concludes that the Great
Southwest Strike illuminates the critical turn- ing point in
American history marked hy the 1886 Great Upheaval of labor. The
strike, she contends, exemplified efforts by leaders like Martin
Irons to establish institutional methods for countering "mass
industry" with "the power of mass action" (226}. She joins
historians like William Forhath and Melvyn Dubofsky, however, by
arguing that legal and governmental force stymied this
possibility.4 She argues that although workers were less united in
1886 than in 1885, it was the federal court in junctions that drove
the decisive wedge between sllilled and unskilled railroad workers.
Court action also forced railroad men to accept the narrow
entrepreneurial concept of "freedom of contract" rather than the
broad old producer vision of free labor, thereby eviscerating the
rationale for mass action. Case's evi- dence also powerfully
reveals that tha labor movement lacked the resources and internal
cohesion needed to confront concentrated capital and state power in
1886, a vulnerability simultaneously exposed by the movement's
disintegration following the eight-hour protest and the Haymarket
incident.
Many historians see broad-based labor activism in decline after the
1880s and 1890s, but John Enyeart, an associate professor at
Bucknell University, contends in The Quest /or 1ust and Pure Law"
that it remained vibrantly alive in the Rocky Mountain states of
Colorado, Montana, and Utah. Thoroughly researched in regional
newspapers, archives, labor puhli- cations, and worker memoirs, and
thoughtfully engaged with recent labor Rocky Mountain workers
embraced women as "key players in organizing drives and other
fights for working-class rights:, though he does not system-
atically explore discrimination against female workers (246). Quest
thus suggests that, despite their prejudices, Rocky Mountain
workers' social demo cratic culture unified them more than workers
elsewhere. It leaves unex- plored, however, how much the region's
relatively large preponderance of Native-horn American and western
European laborers contributed to this over black and Eastern
European workers.
Enyeart dates political unionism's decline to the mid-1910s, rather
than to World War l's aftermath, and in fact minimizes the war's
impact. Following the 1914 Ludlow massacre, he argues, employers
led by John D. Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron Company
escalated their attack on Rocky Mountain workers' social democratic
political culture by advancing welfare capitalism and arbitration
procedures, while obstructing union organizing drives and labor
legislation. By the 1920s, employer resistance and ethno-racial
divisions incited by the Ku Klux Klan undercut Rocky Mountain
workers' political unity, though activists "did not give up the
battle." (239) Encouraged by pro-labor politicians including
Montana Democrat Burton K Wheeler, they continued a -constant
battle for justice,"-guardling] pro-labor policies on the books"
and sustaining a broad view of labor activism that would reemerge
in the 1930s (219, 238).
All three books confirm that American workers experienced the
ideological shift from free-labor producer values to
standard-of-living consumer values from 1870 to 1920 but imply that
the social and institutional context for this change varied from
region to region. The potential for mass mobiliz- ation differed:
It was largely absent in Schmidt's South, defeated by courts and
railroad managers in Case's Southwest, but somewhat successful in
Enyeart's Rocky Mountain West. Likewise, the forum for labor
activism var- ied from southern courts to southwestern streets and
railroad yards to Rocky Mountain political institutions. Finally,
laborers showed diHerent capacities for unity in the South's
relatively homogenous working class, the Southwest's occupationally
divided workforce, and the Rocky Mountain's social demo- cratic
environment. Workers, it seems, moved not as a monolith when they
adjusted to modern industrialism but acted in separate regional
working class cultures. -- (10/01/2011)
"Along with the greater story of the causes and outcome of the
railroad strike, the value of this book is enhanced by many
interesting details about railroaders' race relations, job duties,
attitudes toward work, and so forth."--Kemp Dixon, The Journal of
South Texas
-- (06/20/2013)
"In the first major re-evaluation in fifty years of one of the most
pivotal conflicts in American industrial history, Case offers a
refreshing blend of thick description and convincing argument.
Drawing on a rich archival base, she surrounds powerful characters
like Jay Gould, Terence Powderly, and Martin Irons with a
lesser-known but equally absorbing set of local actors and is
particularly adept at drawing our attention to ambivalent themes of
racial cooperation and Chinese exclusion woven into the strike's
extended narrative."--Leon Fink, distinguished professor, history
department, University of Illinois at Chicago
"Theresa Case does more than revisit the long-neglected 1886
Southwest Railroad strike, a crucial component of that year's
"Great Upheaval" of labor. That, in itself, would represent a
substantial contribution. But she goes much further to recreate the
worlds of white and African-American railroad workers in the late
19th century, exploring with sensitivity the bonds of community,
occupational hierarchies, the centrality of free labor ideology,
biracial unionism, and race relations. The result is a
sophisticated study that deepens our understanding of the Knights
of Labor and race relations in the Gilded Age."--Eric Arnesen,
professor of history, George Washington University, and author of
Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers & the Struggle for
Equality--Eric Arnesen "author of Brotherhoods of Color: Black
Railroad Workers & the Struggle for Equal "
"Theresa A. Case not only offers the most compelling explanation to
date of the strikes' stunning success in 1885 and their spectacular
failure in 1886, but she also uses the strikes as vehicles to
consider matters of race and class, manhood and citizenship, labor
and the law, and region. . . Meticulously researched and richly
narrated, The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor
restores to their rightful place the protests of southwestern
railroad workers and their communities as key events of the 1880s
and demonstrates the importance of the Southwest for
industrialization and the conflicts it generated there."
-;/DIV>--Paul Michel Taillon "The Journal of American History "
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