Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The 1913 Indianapolis Streetcar Strike

WYTS: Indianapolis Colts. Original link here.

I have a ridiculously simple vision for how to fix America: trains, more trains. The Colts play in a sea of parking lots. That should be dense urbanism supported by rail lines. Indianapolis has almost no trains today, just freight and Amtrak. A century ago, there were so many trains, what a paradise, and the city tore itself apart over them. Labor activists did not fuck around back then. This is the 1913 Indianapolis Streetcar Strike!

Streetcars in Indy start getting built in 1864. The first lines were so simple as to be powered by mule, not even steam. By the 20th century the whole system was electrified. Streetcar lines expanded quickly in cities around the world and were prosperous symbols of safe modernity. There’s a lot of money to be made in building a transit network, especially when you can bring customers to exciting new real estate. In addition, Indianapolis was served by a system of "interurbans", a kind of light electric passenger tram that connected 15,000 miles of the country. The interurbans sadly ceased to exist by the time Eisenhower took office. The Indianapolis Traction Terminal, built in 1904, was a mighty monument to rail power, serving 7 million riders a year, 500 trains a day.

This all sounds wonderfully successful. But the problem with railroads is this: it's very profitable to build them, a lot less profitable to maintain them. If you’re say, a capitalist, you can very easily not spend money keeping up infrastructure or hiring enough men, and before you know it, your whole business has gone to shit. This would be the sad story of rail in the 20th century.

Our first signs of trouble begin with labor problems. Streetcar strikes were endemic in this era in dozens of cities, some much worse than the one we're covering today. (31 dead in San Francisco’s strike, in St. Louis they were tossing dynamite around.) The 1913 strike was Indy's second major labor battle in this industry, it was the long-awaited sequel to a strike in the winter of 1892 that ended inconclusively. These strikes were not like the LIRR workers staying home for a long weekend, these actions paralyzed cities. And we’re in the golden age of American socialism, these workers were itching for a fight against the bosses. Sabotage, violence, all kinds of mayhem were common. It’s almost inspirational, but my legal team tells me to advise you not to throw a brick at your boss for everybody's own sake.

Our dramatis personae are the Indianapolis Traction & Terminal Company and the Amalgamated Association of Street & Electric Railway Employees of America. For my own sanity I'll call them "The Company" and "The Union". The Union's VP was John J. Thorpe, and opposing him was Company President Robert Todd. Through the fall of 1912, the Union was gaining more and more members. What made Indy a tempting target for labor organizers was that the Indianapolis Street Railway Company was a union shop, which had been bought by the bigger Indiana Traction Etc. Etc., which was non-union. So in the same city you had union workers living a better life, and non-union guys getting ripped off. Meanwhile, the Company would have preferred that their men work for like 900 hours a week for a half-penny, and also run crews of zero guys per car, if possible, preferably -2 guys.

The Department of Labor offered to mediate the dispute. Todd told them to suck eggs, he was sure there was no labor problem in Indianapolis. Less than half the Company had joined the Union, after all. If there was not a streetcar problem, the Union decided to make one.

On the night of Halloween, the strike began. The whole event had a surreal atmosphere of a grand spooky party, with Union men streaming out of their HQ, Labor Hall, and starting a ruckus. Most of the people on the street seemed to think it was part of the night’s festivities. One clever Union tactic was to drag uninterested guys to the Hall, smack them over the head, and make them sign up while lil birdies flew around their blurry vision. Meanwhile, the Company had been well-prepared for this action. They had spies following Thorpe, had written viscous letters threatening his wife, and imported a lot of scab strikebreakers from Chicago, the dreaded Pinkertons.

The next day, the entire streetcar system in Indy was shut down by protesters and sabotage. The Interurbans seems to have kept running though. People were throwing rocks at cars, throwing bricks at cars, climbing up to cut down the electric lines, I've heard a story that women were just pouring soap on the tracks to destroy traction, which I don’t actually think would work. They were doing whatever they could think of to be maximally annoying, and it seems to have been great fun. The police mobilized to protect "loyal" workers and the repair crews, but actually Indy's police seem to have been on the side of labor here, so they did not get a lot done. Labor solidarity extending to the cops, rare moment in history here.

By the 2nd, the strikebreaker crews had arrived, being well-paid with free room and board so that Company didn't need to pay their regular workers a fair wage. But even they were not all that successful. Every time the scabs managed to launch a streetcar, the mob would rush in, beat the crews up, smash everything with a blunt heavy object, and finally light the car on fire. The cops just watched. Even the mayor, a comedian named Lew Shank (not making that up, he was a Vaudeville guy whose gimmick seems to have been auctioning potatoes - really), did not order a crack down. Election day was coming this week and Shank was a lame duck, so he was happily with the populists here.

Then on the 3rd, Todd tried to retake control of his Terminal Building with an ambivalent police escort as armed guard. He got pelted with so many missiles from the crowd that he had to be rushed to the hospital. He seems to have ended up just fine, not that I can find much info about Mr. Todd, he was not as colorful a character as Mayor Potatoes. The whole city was in a glorious chaos now, John J. Thorpe having proven his point and moreso.

The governor, a progressive reformer named Samuel Ralston, declared martial law. The National Guard were in town by the 5th. The company's headquarters were secured by Gatling Guns (pointing machine guns at crowds happens a lot in these stories). A week after the strike began, the Company had to cave to most demands. The workers got their union, their better pay, and their shorter hours. Some of these gains were lost later as the state came up with their own arbitration: the Company could still hire non-union guys for example. The scabs left town on an Interurban back to Chicago, and the National Guard went home by the 10th. Union leader Thorpe also agreed to leave Indiana and not come back.

Two scabs were killed in the riots, four strikers. Over a hundred injured. And nobody got to work on time for a week.

Meanwhile, Mayor Shank and the police force were in a bit of a bind. 33 officers were threatened with firing for insubordination. Shank resigned a month early in protest and saved their jobs, also saving himself an impeachment. For a moment it looked like the cops would go on strike themselves and start the whole riot over again. (This has happened in other cities.) Mayor Potato Comedian would return to office in the 1920s and unsuccessfully fought the Ku Klux Klan who took over Indiana for a time, but we don't have time for all that today. Governor Ralston, meanwhile, joined with the KKK. He was a successful reformer, but his politics were… complicated. Very Anti-Catholic, turns out.

As we know, all this fighting was a temporary victory, the streetcar system was doomed by history. This was due to decades of deferred maintenance by the Company owners, and the mid-century assumption that streetcars were for the past. This thing called the automobile happened and it was the future. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. If you're a city post-WWII, the federal government was offering you infinite, practically free money to build yourself a highway network, so highways you would build. In 1953, the streetcars were dead, followed by the trolley buses four years later. The Traction Terminal limped on as a bus station for a bit, until it too was torn down. A dismal-looking Hilton stands in its place today.

Since 1957, if you want to get around in Indianapolis, you do it by car or bus. That's it. I actually don’t think your commute times have improved greatly in a century of progress. A very unscientific guess is that it took about a half hour in 1913 to get to work, it’s about a half hour now. Mike Pence was born in 1959, and I'm not saying that streetcars would have stopped that from happening, but we should explore that possibility with more research.

It is illegal to build a light rail in Indiana today. Don’t you even think about it.