480 Chapter 17 An Industrial Giant Emerges
Baltimore and Ohio system in response to a wage
cut and spread to other eastern lines and then
throughout the West until about two-thirds of the
railroad mileage of the country had been shut
down. Violence broke out, rail yards were put to
the torch, and dismayed and frightened business-
men formed militia companies to patrol the streets
of Chicago and other cities. Eventually President
Hayes sent federal troops to the trouble spots to
restore order, and the strike collapsed. There had
been no real danger of revolution, but the violence
and destruction of the strike had been without
precedent in America.
The disturbances of 1877 were a response to a
business slump, those of the next decade a response
to good times. Twice as many strikes occurred in
1886 as in any previous year. Even before the
Haymarket bombing centered the country’s atten-
tion on labor problems, the situation had become so
disturbing that President Grover Cleveland, in the
first presidential message devoted to labor problems,
had urged Congress to create a voluntary arbitration
board to aid in settling labor disputes—a remarkableat stake materially, they were probably more fright-
ened by the uncertainties. Deflation, technological
change, and intense competition kept even the most
successful under constant pressure.
The thinking of most employers was remarkably
confused. They considered workers who joined
unions “disloyal,” and at the same time they treated
labor as a commodity to be purchased as cheaply as
possible. “If I wanted boiler iron,” Henry B. Stone, a
railroad official, explained, “I would go out on the
market and buy it where I could get it cheapest, and if
I wanted to employ men, I would do the same.” Yet
Stone was furious when the men he had “bought”
joined a union. When labor was scarce, employers
resisted demands for higher wages by arguing that the
price of labor was controlled by its productivity; when
it was plentiful, they justified reducing wages by refer-
ring to the law of supply and demand.
Thus capital and labor were often spoiling for a
fight, frequently without fully understanding why.
When labor troubles developed, they tended to be
bitter, even violent. In 1877 a great railroad strike
convulsed much of the nation. It began on the
During the Pullman strike in Chicago, workers protesting wage cuts did $340,000 in property damage, chiefly by burning freight cars.