YEAR: 1877The Great Railroad Strike of 1877
After the Civil War there was a massive boom in railroad construction — followed by the predictable capitalist bust. The railroads became the biggest monopolies in the country. The robber barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould that ran these companies didn’t just profit from the railroads, but also from speculative assets and financial maneuvers.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 exploded when the four biggest railroad monopolies met and conspired to cut wages by 10% across the board. The strike essentially shut down the economy of the entire country from Pittsburgh to Baltimore to Martinsburg, WV, to Buffalo to Albany to Chicago to St. Louis (where workers actually took over the city and governed it for a few days) and Galveston, TX, (where Black workers on the docks and in the laundries were able to organize successfully to raise their wages) the working class was in motion.
The strike was only able to be repressed through the betrayal and overthrow of Reconstruction. When the same Union troops that had been occupying the South were recalled to crush the strike, the remnants of the Confederacy regained control of the South and instituted a regime of Klan terror.
