Labor and the Great Strikes

Industrialization created huge, dangerous, low-paying jobs and almost no legal protection for workers. When labor fought back with strikes, employers did not have to beat them alone. Governors sent state militia and presidents sent federal troops, usually to protect company property and keep trains or factories running rather than to referee fairly. Courts backed this up with injunctions. So strikes repeatedly ran the same pattern: workers walk out, owners call for troops, troops break the picket lines, strike collapses. The 1877 Great Railroad Strike started in West Virginia over wage cuts and spread along the rail lines city by city, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, as workers in each new town joined in, until federal troops restored rail service. The Homestead strike of 1892 followed the same arc: Carnegie Steel manager Henry Clay Frick hired Pinkerton guards, who arrived by barge and lost a gun battle with armed strikers, but the Pennsylvania state militia then occupied the town and reopened the plant with replacement workers.

Out of this hostile climate came two very different unions. The Knights of Labor, strongest in the early 1880s, opened membership to skilled and unskilled workers, women, and Black workers, and pushed broad reforms like the eight-hour day and cooperative ownership. The American Federation of Labor, led by Samuel Gompers, organized only skilled workers into separate craft unions and narrowed its goals to wages, hours, and conditions, a strategy called bread-and-butter unionism. The Knights declined less because of the 1886 Haymarket bombing, which Americans wrongly blamed on the union, and more because their structure could not hold such a broad coalition together once momentum stalled. This set up labor's path for the next decades: cautious, craft-based unionism surviving while broader movements struggled against hostile courts and troops.