The strikers met that night at Father Matthew Hall, and agreed to "Be in favor of maintaining the peace and quiet of the city in every emergency." They did not, however, allow mail to enter the city. As one man said, "If the coal trains shall cease to carry the coal to market, the mining of coal must cease." The strikers allowed some passenger trains to reach their destinations. The railroad strike carried implications for the remainder of local industry, as large amounts of goods could not be transported in or out of the city without the use of rail. On July 24 at 12:00 P.M., 1,000 employees of the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company, unaffiliated with the railroad, peacefully walked out due to their own wage reduction. On July 23, the workers of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad in Scranton proposed that their wages be restored to that prior to the recently imposed 10% reduction. As one observer stated "the great trouble here in Scranton is our population, an excess of miners for the work to be done." Events of 23–25 July Scranton, as depicted on an 1890 panoramic map Making matters worse, the local mining companies had again reduced wages, and railroad and industry owners imposed similar cuts for rail and manufacturing workers. Again, efforts to organize a strike were ineffective.īy the summer of 1877 tensions were high as news spread of the violence in industrial centers across Pennsylvania and the nation. : 316 The next two years saw the mines run on two-thirds time, and another wage reduction of fifteen percent was made in 1876. Efforts to rouse a strike in response were fruitless. In 1874 mine owners reduced workers' wages by ten percent. Another 16 were killed in an uprising in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, and strikers set fire to much of central Philadelphia in disturbances there. Violence broke out in Pittsburgh, and between July 21 and 22, 40 were killed and more than 1,000 rail cars and 100 engines were destroyed. The resulting public dissatisfaction erupted Jin Martinsburg, West Virginia, and spread to Maryland, New York, Illinois, Missouri and Pennsylvania. In 1876 alone, 76 railroad companies went bankrupt or entered receivership. Approximately 18,000 businesses failed between 1873, and in 1875, production in iron and steel alone dropped as much as 45%, and a million or more lost their jobs. The Long Depression, sparked in the US by the Panic of 1873, had far reaching implications for US industry, shuttering more than a hundred railroads in the first year and cutting construction of new rail lines from 7,500 miles of track in 1872 to 1,600 miles in 1875. Opinions differ on the root causes of the strike and ensuing violence.īackground Burning of Union Depot, Pittsburgh, 21–22 July 1877 The militia would go on to be reformed into a battalion of the Pennsylvania National Guard. Two were tried and one convicted in libel suits related to published criticism of the militia. More than a score of those involved in the shooting were arrested for murder, and later tried and found not-guilty of the crime of manslaughter. Minor acts of violence continued until the last of the strikers returned to work on October 17, having won no concessions. State and federal troops were called to the town, and imposed martial law. Many had returned to work when violence erupted on August 1 after a mob attacked the town's mayor, and then clashed with local militia, leaving four dead and many more wounded. The strike began on July 23 when railroad workers walked off the job in protest of recent wage cuts, and within three days it grew to include perhaps thousands of workers from a variety of industries. The Scranton general strike was a widespread work stoppage in 1877 by workers in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which took place as part of the Great Railroad Strike, and was the last in a number of violent outbreaks across Pennsylvania.
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