Rise of Organised Labour, 1877–70 (AQA A-Level History): Revision Notes
Rise of Organised Labour, 1877–70
Introduction to the labour movement
Trade unions emerged in the United States during the late 19th century, driven largely by rapid industrial expansion. The central struggle for organised labour focused on achieving recognition from employers and establishing the right to negotiate improvements in pay and working conditions. Labour activists campaigned for institutional frameworks that would compel employers to bargain with worker representatives. They sought to establish systems for mediation, conciliation and arbitration, alongside securing the right to strike when negotiations failed.
Trade unions were organisations that existed to be recognised as legitimate representatives of their membership, enabling them to negotiate with employers on behalf of workers. Their primary goal was to gain formal recognition and bargaining power rather than simply acting as informal worker associations.
Early unions before 1877
Before 1877, union organisation remained sporadic and predominantly local in character. Small craft unions organised workers around particular trades within specific localities, focusing on concerns relevant to their immediate area. The National Labor Union, established in 1866, represented a rare exception to this pattern. Seventy-seven delegates representing 60,000 workers assembled in Baltimore to launch this national organisation, adopting a platform centred on securing legislation to protect the eight-hour working day.
However, this union proved short-lived. The economic depression of 1873 forced millions of workers into unemployment and out of their unions. By 1877, the nation's total union membership had collapsed from its 1872 peak of 300,000 to just 50,000.
The Vulnerability of Early Labour Organisations
This dramatic decline demonstrated the vulnerability of early labour organisations to economic downturns and the difficulty of maintaining unity without secure financial resources. Early unions lacked the organizational infrastructure and financial reserves necessary to weather economic crises, making them extremely fragile institutions.
The national railroad strike, 1877
In 1877, when the owners of the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad announced a pay reduction—the fourth such cut in as many years—workers abandoned their posts. The strike rapidly escalated as workers from competing railroads joined the action, followed by workers from entirely unrelated industries who walked out in sympathy. This expanding mass of workers attacked railroad yards, set trains alight and tore up track sections.
The most intense violence erupted in Pittsburgh, where approximately 5,000 workers confronted 650 federal troops in a sustained battle. The workers destroyed the railroad yard, burning more than 500 railway cars, 104 locomotives and 39 buildings. When troops fired into the rioting crowd, 25 people died in the gunfire.
Military forces eventually re-established order along the nation's railroad lines, though not before strikers had destroyed property valued at over $10 million and deeply alarmed observers of these events. For middle-class urbanites and small-town residents removed from harsh industrial realities, the size, rapid spread, worker solidarity and extreme violence of the strike raised the disturbing prospect of social warfare barely a decade after the Civil War's conclusion.
Contradictory Outcomes of the Railroad Strike
The railroad strike produced contradictory effects on both sides of the industrial conflict:
- Workers recognized they stood no chance of prevailing in direct confrontation against the combined power of industrial owners and federal government without building stronger unions and pursuing political engagement
- The business community determined to suppress labour associations by whatever means proved necessary
- A newspaper article from August 1877 encapsulated this attitude, declaring the need to crush worker resistance
Despite its immediate failure, the 1877 strike marked a watershed moment that galvanised both sides of the emerging industrial conflict.
The Knights of Labor
Foundation and objectives
In the decade following the railroad strike, unions expanded rapidly. The most ambitious organisation to emerge was the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869. The Knights sought to create a comprehensive organisation that would unite workers across all races, genders, ethnicities and occupations. They pressed government to implement the eight-hour working day and restrict child labour. They campaigned for the initiative and referendum—electoral processes allowing ordinary citizens to propose and vote directly on legislation.
More radically than other unions, the Knights aimed to establish cooperative labour-management relations. Their vision encompassed industries governed by councils of workers and managers within genuinely democratic, and ultimately collectively-owned, enterprises.
Growth in the 1880s
During the 1880s, the Knights experienced dramatic expansion. By 1885, the organisation claimed 100,000 members and achieved its greatest triumph that same year. When the Wabash Railroad, operating within Jay Gould's Southwest System, attempted to break a local union, the Knights organised a sympathy strike. Within days, the entire Southwest System ground to a halt and the Wabash management was compelled to negotiate with its workforce. Energised by this victory, the Knights attracted thousands of new recruits; within a year, 750,000 workers had joined the comprehensive organisation.
Decline after Haymarket
The Knights' rapid success, however, contributed directly to their downfall. In 1886, tens of thousands of recently-recruited workers initiated industrial action, but established members often refused to support these walkouts. Even more damaging, when an eight-hour-day rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square descended into violence, all supporters of the eight-hour campaign faced condemnation. The Knights of Labor, due to their size and public profile, received the harshest criticism.
Lessons from the Knights' Collapse
Within a year of the Haymarket incident, the Knights' membership had been reduced by half; within a decade, the organisation had ceased to exist. This rapid collapse demonstrated that:
- Rapid expansion without adequate organizational infrastructure could undermine unity
- Internal divisions between established and new members could prove fatal
- Association with radical violence, even indirectly, could destroy public support
- Ambitious, idealistic objectives were more vulnerable to public backlash than pragmatic goals
The Haymarket bomb outrage, 1886
Events at McCormick and Haymarket Square
A strike at the McCormick Harvester Works in Chicago during May 1886 triggered a sequence of events that would devastate the labour movement. On 3 May, a confrontation erupted between strikers, strikebreakers and police officers protecting the plant. When police opened fire on the crowd, several people died and many sustained injuries. In response, anarchists from the Black International—a revolutionary organisation established in Chicago in 1881—called a protest meeting in Haymarket Square, located at the centre of the lumber yards and packing houses district.
The mayor attended the gathering, determined it remained peaceful and departed. When rain began falling, the crowd dispersed. Someone then threw a bomb that killed a policeman and wounded more than 60 others, six of whom later died. The police retaliated by firing indiscriminately into the crowd, wounding more than a hundred people, some fatally.
Trial and aftermath
Public sentiment turned overwhelmingly hostile towards anarchists. Seven men were arrested, tried, found guilty and executed in 1887. The case generated intense public attention domestically and internationally.
The Haymarket affair devastated the eight-hour movement of 1886, which collapsed almost entirely. Of the numerous workers who had participated in the campaign, only 15,000 retained their reduced hours by year's end. Once more, organised labour had encountered defeat.
The Black International's Inflammatory Rhetoric
The invitation circulated by the Black International Movement before the Haymarket meeting revealed the confrontational character of anarchist politics. The document, published in S.D. Cashman's America in the Gilded Age (1993), called workers to arms, characterising the police killings at McCormick's as targeting "poor wretches" who possessed "the courage to disobey the supreme will of your bosses." This inflammatory rhetoric demonstrated the radical ideology that business interests and middle-class observers found threatening.
American Federation of Labor
Formation and structure
The organisation that came to occupy the central position in the labour movement was the American Federation of Labor (AFL), established by Samuel Gompers in 1885. Rather than functioning as a single unified union, the AFL operated as a federation of semi-independent craft associations. The organisation admitted only skilled white men. Its objectives were comparatively modest; the federation concentrated exclusively on securing higher wages and shorter working hours for its members, abandoning the broader social objectives that had motivated the Knights. Nevertheless, the AFL expanded substantially, claiming more than a quarter of a million members by 1892.
Policies and approach
The AFL recognised the discord the Knights had provoked and deliberately avoided repeating their errors. It acknowledged the autonomy of each constituent trade and prevented the executive council from interfering in internal affairs of member unions. The organisation imposed a levy on member unions to establish a strike fund and maintain a secretariat. To advance labour legislation in cities and states, it created central and state federations.
The AFL's Pragmatic Strategy
The AFL's policy centred on supporting unions in securing recognition and obtaining agreements from employers through collective bargaining. The federation would sanction strikes only when negotiations failed. This pragmatic approach prioritised concrete gains over revolutionary transformation, making the organization more sustainable than its predecessors.
Gompers' leadership
Gompers was elected as the AFL's first president in 1896 and continued in that role until his death in 1924, providing nearly three decades of consistent leadership that shaped the organisation's moderate, craft-based approach to labour organisation.
Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gompers was an English immigrant of Dutch-Jewish ancestry who departed London in 1863 aged thirteen. He spent his adolescence in the cigar-making shops of the Lower East Side of New York, where he absorbed the political debates among fellow workers and developed an interest in labour organisation. His foremost concern centred on the position of skilled labour. Under his leadership, the AFL secured greater stability for organised labour than any previous American labour organisation had achieved.
Key dates
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1866 | Formation of the National Labor Union |
| 1869 | Foundation of the Knights of Labor |
| 1877 | National railroad strike |
| 1885 | Establishment of the American Federation of Labor |
| 1886 | Haymarket bomb outrage; decline of Knights of Labor |
Key Points to Remember:
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The 1877 railroad strike, though crushed by federal troops, demonstrated to workers the necessity of building stronger unions and pursuing political strategies, while simultaneously convincing business interests to suppress labour organisation.
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The Knights of Labor grew rapidly in the 1880s, peaking at 750,000 members after the successful Wabash Railroad strike (1885), but the organisation collapsed within a decade following the Haymarket affair.
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The Haymarket bomb attack (1886) and subsequent execution of seven anarchists turned public opinion decisively against radical labour activism and destroyed the eight-hour movement of that year.
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The American Federation of Labor, established by Samuel Gompers in 1885, adopted a more conservative approach than the Knights, focusing exclusively on skilled white workers and limiting objectives to wages and hours rather than broader social transformation.
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By 1892, the AFL had grown to over 250,000 members, demonstrating that a pragmatic, craft-based federation could achieve more sustainable success than comprehensive, idealistic organisations.