WYTS: Pittsburgh Steelers. Original post here.
In 1854, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) began service between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Before its completion, the two centers of the state had been tied together by “The Main Line of Public Works”, a combination of rivers, canals, and some crude railways over the mountains. The Alleghenies are not the world’s most extreme peaks since the Ice Age flattened them, but on what America could call the roads in the early 1800s, getting over them was a month-long journey. Even on the Main Line, it took four days, including some terrifyingly steep cog railway segments. Once the mighty PRR (or “Pennsy”) came along, the journey from America’s great steel center to the City of Brotherly Love could now be done in hours, in safety, and on mostly level passing. Railroads are cool, romantic, and egalitarian. Horseshoe Curve is beautiful. Rail = good, right? Well.......
To start this story, we need to Remember a (Real Bad) Guy, Thomas A. Scott. He was president of the
Pennsylvania Railroad and that meant he was arguably more powerful than whoever
was in the White House. (The joke is that if you said “the president” in
Pennsylvania at the time, they’d ask “which one?”) Scott was a great ally to Lincoln
and a builder of a mighty railroad empire. The PRR would soon be the largest
corporation in the world, thanks to ruthless tactics to destroy the
competition. They also used very weird accounting practices involving 1000-year leases of
shell railroads that... I’ll be honest, I don’t understand at all – neither did
anybody else, as history would show. President Scott was one of the first of a need
breed of businessmen, a robber baron. He, and the railroad companies, were widely despised and feared.
Tom Scott’s greatest moment was helping to “solve” the 1876
presidential election, between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat
Samuel Tilden. Four states (including the ever-wise Florida) were unable to
determine where their electoral votes would go, meaning this debate went to
Congress. And there were weeks of acrimony on how to vote. The suspicion has
always been there was an unwritten bargain in a smoke-filled room, though most rooms until about the year 2000 were filled with smoke in the US. Historians
will debate the exact nature of the deal, if there was a deal at all, but the
exchange was: “Rutherfraud” got to be president, Reconstruction would end,
Southern Democrats could deal with their Black population however they felt
like, and Scott would get to build a transcontinental railroad from Texas to
California.
That southwestern railroad did not happen, btw. This all might
be some 150-year-old conspiracy theory. By the summer of 1877, Scott and Pennsy
had bigger problems: a huge strike. But he did have the backing of a Republican
president, cementing that party’s pro-business outlook for the rest of
eternity, and federal troops were on their way north… just in the nick of time.
1877 was the fourth year of a huge depression which laissez
faire federal policy had been unable to fix... somehow, I'm not sure how, since the free market cannot fail, it can only be failed. Workers had a very raw deal
here. Railroad construction was slowing down, and as I mentioned in another story,
railroads make their money by building tracks, not really by maintaining what
they have. Once you stop building, you need to cut margins, and what’s really
expensive? Labor. Workers suffered pay cut after pay cut. And thanks to the new
automatic Westinghouse Air Brake, a legitimately great safety invention, Pennsy wanted to double the train lengths. That meant effectively cutting the already poorer workforce by half.
Oh also they cut the pay by 10% in June 1877, out of the blue, while in cartel action with other rival Railroads like the B&O or Reading Railroad who also cut their wages. That was the
last straw. 100,000 people struck from Baltimore all the way to St. Louis, with some labor action happening in distant San Francisco (we'll get to that in another story), probably the biggest single labor action in American history at the time. And
still one of the most violent.
The railroads with Hayes at their back, cracked down on these actions, strike after strike, town after town. Railroad corporations in the US at this time should not really be thought of in terms of like, Ford or Apple, modern corporations. They were closer to the British East India Company in spirit. These were extractive violent operations with enormous government mandates and huge swathes of territory under their control, sometimes even their own small armed police forces. They were vicious imperial masters. The federal and railroad response to the strike cost hundred of lives in 1877: 2 dead in NYC, 10 in Baltimore, 20 in Chicago, 18 in St. Louis, dozens murdered in every rail town in Pennsylvania. It was most violent in… um… what city is this again? Oh yeah, Pittsburgh! We can finally talk about this thing.
Here it all began on July 19th. Seeing the labor action across the country, the crews decided to shut it all down. Strikers soon seized the
rail switches and the crowds grew bigger and bigger. The Governor, John F.
Hartranft, a Civil War hero, ordered troops in, but the city of Pittsburgh had
fucked up. Due to budget cuts, they had almost no daylight police available,
having laid most of them off. The nearest reliable troops would need to come
over via rail from Philadelphia. Why that far? Because the local Western
Pennsylvania militia liked the strikers better than the railroad. By the
evening 1,500 rail cars had nowhere to go, causing a huge traffic jam around the
city.
It was not until July 21st that the fresh forces arrived to
protect Tom Scott's interests. The striker's demands were simple: no more
double-trains, no pay cuts, re-hire the men laid off. President Scott is said
to have remarked "give them a rifle diet for a few days and see how they
like that kind of bread." The full reply the strikers got came from the
Philadelphia Infantry, aiming guns at them. They had something like 600 men, along with Gatling Guns (drink!), and fixed bayonets.
Against a crowd of 12,000 people, only a fraction of which were strikers, the
militia opened fire and stabbed their rifles into bodies. 20 people were killed at
once, including women and children.
The Philadelphia National Guard, however, did not simply end
the strike in one volley as in the Milwaukee story. Pittsburgh just got madder
after the massacre. No part of the strike had been a riot before, now it was.
The mob seized arms from the Great Western Gun-Works and took control of much
of downtown. This almost became an internal Pennsylvania civil war for a few
hours, as the Pittsburgh troops joined up with the mob. The
rail yards were targeted and sacked, whole trains burning in the night. The
rail executives in the city fled to a nearby hotel, under fake names.
The Guard retreated to a roundhouse at the train depot,
while thousands of angry Yinzers laid siege to the structure. The battle took
all night. There was a major fight over an artillery piece that could have
bombarded the roundhouse. Some ingenious members of the mob set fire to trains
and used them as rolling fire ships to break the enemy defense. With a burning
structure all around them, the pro-company militia would have to flee through
the streets of the city. The Guard took fire from all directions, even from
uniformed city police officers. Local legends talk of a "Pat the
Avenger" who killed several of them with well-aimed shots, some kind of mythological Ghost of Pittsburgh. The Allegheny Arsenal garrison told the fleeing army to effectively 'screw off' and kept their doors locked. Finally, the Philadelphians got across the
Allegheny River to safety. All told they lost eight men in the fighting, and
about a dozen more were injured. Maybe another 20 strikers died in the battle in return.
That left the city in the hands of the mob, who wrecked
great anger on the Pennsylvania Railroad yards. (Though rumor has it some of
the arson was self-inflicted by PRR agents, looking for insurance pay-outs on
old equipment.) People just looted whatever they wanted from the trains, with
the cops helping out with the mass-distribution of booty. Still, fire did
spread in other areas, an innocent grain elevator was torched by mistake. Thanks
to careful management of the flames, Pittsburgh did not burn down in some great
conflagration.
No, that was in 1845 when Pittsburgh burned down. Separate event entirely. Many American cities burnt down at one point or another in the 1800s, it was not that big of a deal.
By July 28th, it was all over. Fresh state militia marched
in, the "mutinous" (at best) local militia joined with them, and 3,000 of Rutherfraud's federal troops assisted. But they didn't really have anybody to fight.
The riot had burnt out its energy by the 23rd. The aftermath was shockingly
lenient as far as I can tell: no trials, none of the strikers were arrested or
blamed for the violence. Over 60 people were dead, many buildings were burnt,
hundreds of locomotives were destroyed, and miles of rail track were twisted by
the flames to be unusable. It took another week to get the trains running
through Pittsburgh again.
Meanwhile, the pro-railroad National Guard continued a reign
of terror against strikers all through the state, massacring people in Reading,
in Scranton, and a town whose name I have to say in a Jim Carry voice:
Sha-mokin! The railroads had won the battles, but in fact, lost the war for the
hearts and minds of the nation. They quietly caved over the next few years to
the workers, admitting that laying people off might be more expensive in the long run. Labor power only kept growing, the Knights of Labor, for
example, would be at the height of their power come 1885, and... now we're back
to the eight-hour workweek battles.
Pittsburgh would stay as a flash point for labor rights for
decades. We’d get the Holmstead Strike in 1892 against the steel industry
(which also ended in violent chaos), then a bigger steel strike in 1919, both
failed. There was another huge railroad road strike in 1922. In 1938, the CIO was
born here in Pittsburgh. Most of the labor's demands were won by the time of New Deal.
Now I guess the local economy is mostly based on running UPMC, which… eh, could
be worse. (They’re not Cigna at least.)
Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, in theory
making it illegal for the military to be used at random by the president (or
his railroad friends) against the public. That's a whole can of worms which has
been read a billion different ways just in this decade alone, but let's just
say the act can be and has been ignored if needed. Hayes signed the law, and only served one
term in office. Nobody was much impressed by his four years in office. Republicans in exchange gave up the entire South to violent reprisals by ex-Confederate terrorists.
Tom Scott died of a stroke in 1881. Most presidents of
the railroad worked themselves to death and died in office. The Pennsylvania
Railroad had not yet begun to peak. It was the "standard
railroad of the world", so great that it was unimaginable that it would
ever decline until boom, trucks and cars happened, also turns out it was
secretly bankrupt by the 1960s. (Remember those weird accounting practices?
Yeah, even the PRR didn’t understand them.) This is how NY Penn Station goes from a monument to an afterthought stuck under a basketball arena. Then it merged into Penn
Central, a hilarious disaster that was doomed to fail, the government had to
nationalize the major railroads in the Northeast US for a few decades. Today,
Norfolk Southern rules it all, and the free market has granted us a rail system
that is once again the envy of the world, right? Right?
Okay, maybe there's some issues... but that merger with Union Pacific will fix whatever is wrong! The free market cannot fail!
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