One hundred and forty-three years ago the nation was shaken by a nationwide series of strikes almost amounting to a mass rebellion. Though there are clear and obvious differences between the issues, modes of collective action, and the participants of that upheaval and the multiracial protests of African-Americans, other people of color, and their white allies that have occurred over the past two weeks, the similarities are real enough to offer some perspective on present circumstances.
The issue that started the 1877 affair was not police brutality and institutional racism but economic inequality. The year 1877 was the low point of the 1873-1878 depression, which brought wage cuts of 10 to 30 percent, driving many workers and their families to the point of desperation. The strikes began when railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia walked off the job following a 10 percent cut on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The strike spread west and soon engulfed transportation centers and major industrial cities including Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Chicago.
But, like the rallies and marches against the murder of George Floyd, what started out as a protest quickly escalated beyond the control of those who sought to lead it. It devolved into heterogeneous crowds with their own dynamics, sometimes resulting in violent clashes with authorities and property damage.
In Pittsburgh, after it became clear that the Pittsburgh police and militia sympathized with the local crowds, authorities called in the militia from Philadelphia, sparking outrage and violence. After the outsiders fired on the protesters causing twenty deaths, a diverse crowd tried to burn down the round house into which the militia had fled and then burned and looted the rail yards.
In Chicago the railroad strike quickly escalated into a general strike for a 20 percent wage increase and the eight-hour day. Mobile crowds of various occupations (or no occupation at all) traversed the industrial districts calling out employees to strike. To most of the press, they were lawless mobs--“ragamuffins, vagrants, and saloon bummers.” But a more accurate description was that they were “roaming committees of strikers” often joined by passersby and teenage boys out for adventure. The press’s conflation of protesters expressing serious social grievances with these hangers-on encouraged much of the public to dismiss the whole affair as a “riot.”