Vol. 72/No. 42      October 27, 2008

BY PHILIP FONER  
The Great Strike of 1877 occurred six years after the Paris Commune—the working class-led revolution which took power in that city on March 18, 1871, and, for the seventy-two days of its existence, established a new type of state. The news of the “Revolution of March 18” produced a wave of fear throughout the established circles in both Europe and the United States. It soon became the practice to blame the social tensions in the United States on foreign influence, and this technique was employed with increasing frequency during the economic crisis of the 1870s. During the troubles on the railroads in 1873-74, there were some references to the fact that the strikers were determined to establish a Commune in the United States. But it was in the Great Strike of 1877 that a large portion of the press came to view the outbreaks as the “long-matured concerted assertion of Communism throughout the United States.”

This theme did not emerge immediately. Indeed, at first even those newspapers that denounced the strike still found it possible to express sympathy for the strikers. They insisted that it was impossible to equate the situation of workers, whose entire livelihood had been threatened by the wage cuts, with that of the railroad stockholders, whose dividends may have been reduced. And they ridiculed management’s defense that its salaries, too, had been cut 10 percent, along with the wages of the workingmen. As one newspaper replied:

The officials can build palaces, the laborer can rent a hovel. The one can roll along in the bustling splendor of a four-in-hand, the other cannot hide the burnt and frost-bitten foot. These railroad authorities can afford salaries that will secure the costliest luxuries but cannot grant enough to the beggared, starving, crushed laborer and his family to meet the commonest necessities of life.

Even though these newspapers urged the strikers not to resort to violence in the justifiable redress of their grievances, several added the observation that in the face of management’s “arrogant impudence,” violent, and even revolutionary measures might be in order. “Certainly, rebellion against lawful authority is never lawful,” one paper put it, “but the principle that freed our nation from tyranny will free labor from domestic aggression.” The Missouri Republican, published in St. Louis, declared that “if the laboring men of this country must choose between revolution and abject submission to the heartless demand of capital, they will certainly not be condemned by this journal if they prefer war to starvation.”

But once the strike got under way, such expressions were no longer heard, and even before the great upheaval at Pittsburgh, the note of “Communism” was being injected into news and editorial columns alike. From the very outset of the strike in Martinsburg, the fear was voiced that if the “great mobs” succeeded in imposing their terms on the railroads by violence, “communism would be established in America.” Thus, as early as July 19, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle warned that the strike was endangering American society, and that it had to be dealt with as if it were an “insurrection,” and not just a “labor dispute”:

It is not pleasant to think of men being mowed down by soldiers, but it will be a much worse spectacle for the country to have a mob triumphant in a state like West Virginia than to have the life blown out of men who refuse to recognize the right of every American to control his own labor and his own property. This is the nearest approach we have yet had to communism in America, and if we are to be saved from the darker horrors of that system, our authorities must act with unmistakable vigor in the present emergency.

The Pittsburgh massacres were viewed by the labor press as a prime example of corporate and military brutality. But the commercial press unleashed a veritable barrage of editorials blaming the events of July 22 and 23 entirely on the communists. Some newspapers bluntly accused the Pittsburgh strikers of being communists (a fact which, according to the New York Tribune, “does not need demonstration”), and reprinted the editorial in the Pittsburgh Leader which concluded that “the workingman in Pittsburgh is really a communist, and there is no doubt that communistic ideas have widely spread.” Most papers, however, insisted that it was not the strikers themselves who were responsible for the violence in Pittsburgh and other railroad centers, but rather a group of men who were neither railroad strikers nor their sympathizers. They were the “destructionists,” who had been unleashed by a powerful, secret, oath-bound central organization headed by men who saw in the Great Strike a “golden opportunity to establish the Commune in the United States.”  
 
 
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