Great Fortunes from Railroads

by Gustavus Myers

THE GREAT STRIKE OF 1877.

Making a loud and plaintive outcry about their declining revenues, some of the railroad systems prepared to assess their fictitious losses upon the workers by cutting down wages. They had already reduced wages to the point of the merest subsistence; and now they decreed that wages must again be curtailed ten cents on every dollar. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, then in the hands of the Garrett family, with a career behind it of consecutive political corruption and fraud, in some ways surpassing that of the Vanderbilts, led in reducing the wages of its workers. The Pennsylvania Railroad followed, and then the Vanderbilts gave the order for another reduction.

At once the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad employees retaliated by declaring a strike; the example was followed by the Pennsylvania men. In order to alienate the sympathy of the general public and to have a pretext for suppressing the strike with armed force, the railroads, it is quite certain, instigated riots at Martinsburg, W. Va., and at Pittsburg. Troops were called out and the so-called mobs were fired on, resulting in a number of strikers being killed and many wounded.

That the railroads deliberately destroyed their own property and then charged the culpability to the strikers, was common report. So conservative an authority as Carroll D. Wright, for a long time United States Commissioner of Labor, tells of the railroad agents setting a large number of old, decayed, worthless freight cars at Pittsburg on fire, and accusing the strikers of the act. He further tells of the Pennsylvania Railroad subsequently extorting millions of dollars from the public treasury on the ground that the destruction of these cars resulted from riot. Wright says that from all that he has been able to gather, he believes the reports of the railroads manufacturing riots to have been true. [Footnote: "The Battles of Labor": 122. In all, the railroad companies secured approximately $22,000,000 from the public treasury in Pennsylvania as indemnity for property destroyed during these "riots." In a subsequent chapter, the corruption of the operation is described.] Vanderbilt acted with greater wisdom than his fellow magnates. Adopting a conciliatory stand, he averted a strike on his lines by restoring the old rate of wages and by other mollifying measures.

He was now assailed from a different direction. The long gathering anger and enmity of the various sections of the middle class against the corporate wealth which had possessed itself of so dictatorial a power, culminated in a manner as instructive as it was ineffective.

In New York State, the Legislature was prevailed upon, in 1879, to appoint an investigating committee. Vanderbilt and other railroad owners, and a multitude of complaining traders were haled up to give testimony; the stock-jobbing transactions of Vanderbilt and Gould were fully and tediously gone into, as also were the methods of the railroads in favoring certain corporations and mercantile establishments with secret preferential freight rates.

Not in the slightest did this long-drawn investigation have any result calculated to break the power of the railroad owners, or their predominant grip upon governmental functions.

The magnate class preferred to have no official inquiries; there was always the annoying possibility that in some State or other inconvenient laws might be passed, or harrassing legal actions begun; and while revocation or amendment of these laws could be put through subsequently when the popular excitement had died away, and the suits could be in some way defeated, the exposures had an inflaming effect upon a population as yet ill-used to great one-man power of wealth. But if the middle class insisted upon action against the railroad magnates, there was no policy more suitable to these magnates than that of being investigated by legislative committees. They were not averse to their opponents amusing themselves, and finding a vent for their wrath, in volumes of talk which began nowhere and ended nowhere. In reply to charges, the magnates could put in their skillful defense, and inject such a maze of argument, pettifoggery and technicalities into the proceedings, that before long the public, tired of the puzzle, was bound to throw up its hands in sheer bewilderment, unable to get any concrete idea of what it was all about.