40 ChaPter^1
workers elsewhere to join in the strike. In Baltimore, the state militia fired
on huge crowds of workers, leaving 11 dead and 40 hurt. In Pittsburgh, St.
Louis, and Chicago, all rail workers went on strike, and then all the industrial
workers, not just those on the railroad, struck in those cities. The U.S. indus-
trial base was virtually shut down! In Pittsburgh, a committee of strikers
actually took over the city for a week and the National Guard, called out to
remove them, ended up joining in the strike with the industrial workers. In
Chicago, the mayor ordered the police to fire directly into crowds of strikers,
and they got into shootouts with labor and killed 30. The railroads were
shaken and owners raised wages and gave workers an 8-hour workday. But
those gains took a huge toll. The Great Uprising lasted two weeks, over 100
died, and millions of dollars in property was destroyed. For the only time in
U.S. history, workers struck nationally, and labor had acted collectively with
some positive results. However, it was also clear that the government–the
police, the courts, the army and other institutions–were on the side of the
bosses. President Hayes wrote in his diary that the workers were “put down
by force” and the government constructed armories in major cities so that
troops would be prepared to put down labor uprisings in the future.
Government suppression of labor would become a more troubling problem
for workers as time went on.
In the short term, however, the Great Strike of 1877 encouraged more
workers to take collective action. In fact, the first briefly successful national
union emerged–the Knights of Labor [K of L]. The K of L began in 1869 but
gained a large numbers of members–some claim close to a million–after 1877.
The K of L was an organization of all producers, people who actually made
things or grew crops. All workers–male, female, white and black, skilled and
unskilled were invited to join. Only gamblers, prostitutes and lawyers–who did
not produce things of social value–were banned from joining! The K of L
opposed the wage system and wanted to establish cooperatives, organizations
where the workers and farmers owned and made decisions about production.
The Knights believed in “an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the
wage system of labor and republican system of government.” With their mes-
sage of class conflict, the K of L grew well into the 1880s and was lobbying
for better wages and working conditions, and a national 8-hour workday law.
The head of the K of L, Terrence V. Powderly, said that workers were not
“the free people that we imagine we are.” The violence and intimidation
experienced during the Great Strike of 1877 certainly proved him correct, and