"The Cruel Striker War" - NIU Digital Projects

"The Cruel Striker War"
Rail Labor & the Broken Symmetry of Galesburg Civic Culture
1877-1888
by
Mark A. Lause
Over a century ago, the halls of labor organizations stood
cheek by jowl with the banks and businesses along Main street in
Galesburg, Illinois. The engineers' brotherhood enjoyed a
prominent location at the corner of Prairie Street, as did the
firemen's local. Conductors had their headquarters a block away at
Cherry Street. The national headquarters of the Brakemen's Union
moved there late in 1885. In the middle of that block, the hall of the
Knights of Labor housed two large assemblies composed of
railroad and other workers. 1
Such a working class presence rarely features in our modern
impressions of small city Main Streets in the late nineteenth
century Midwest. Contemporary histories, largely chronicled by
boosters, have extolled a human pageant of development,
prosperity and stability essentially immune to the social conflicts
associated with the great cities. More recently, scholars have
recognized both the importance of smaller cities and towns in the
nation's industrialization and the distinctive kinds of labor
movements they fostered. There, workers may have had fewer
opportunities, but often enjoyed a greater civic identity which,
when threatened, inspired a more politically aggressive response
than in the great metropolitan centers. Most communities known to
have experienced politically insurgent labor movements in the late
1880s were, in fact, very small. 2 That these local efforts faced
almost simultaneous tactical reversals seems an unlikely
explanation for their virtual collapse by the end of 1888.
Post-Civil War Galesburg offers particularly dramatic
evidence for a reconsideration of its civic culture. In 1849, the
JOURNAL OF THE ILLINOIS STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
VOL: 91. NO. 3 AUTUMN 1998
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twelve year old town, with a homogeneous Yankee population of
under a thousand, held its first railroad meeting and began its rapid
transformation into a regional center for large scale commercial
farming, booming secondary industries, and a new industrial
working class. Between 1877 and 1888, this pluralistic industrial
community of between 10,000 and 15,000 included not only
railroad builders but antimonopolist agitators, labor organizers,
immigrant communists, activist clergymen, and company spies.
Violence stemming from bitter strikes left children walking to
school past sites where "blood turned dry and rusty on the wooden
boards—and we cursed this and that." Class sentiment grew so
intense by 1888 that the community gave American labor what
historian Selig Perlman called "its only victory in independent
politics." 3 Galesburg's response to these conflicts demonstrates the
changing nature of working class citizenship.
I
Galesburg was founded not in Illinois but in upstate New
York. The "Second Great Awakening" of the early nineteenth
century so revived the religious predispositions of those New
Englanders who had peopled upstate New York that the area
became known as the "burned-over district." There, the Reverend
George Washington Gale's plan for a community dedicated to the
training of ministers resurrected the old Puritan vision of "a city on
the hill." Other Yankees had already begun to settle in northern
Illinois by 1835 when members of Gale's company purchased
almost 11,000 acres in the Central Military Tract, an area set aside
for veterans' land bounties that was beginning a development both
rapid and orderly. 4 Over the next two years, Gale's project took
form on the prairie five miles west of Knoxville, the seat of recently
organized Knox County.
Later, surviving founders recalled egalitarian and
cooperative lives characteristic of the pioneering experience. Early
settlers kept their horses, cattle and hogs together on the unfenced
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prairie. With money "little known and seldom seen," necessity as
well as neighborly trust made barter and credit essential to
economic life. Activities like corn husking, apple paring, logrolling
and house-raising blended work and play. Rumored Indian
attacks or an outbreak of horse thievery inspired not demands for
military protection or a professional police force but for a
distribution of arms for civilian self-protection and a citizens'
watch.
Moreover, Galesburg's 232 founders shared a common
dedication to their community's educational and philanthropic
purpose. They enjoyed a similar ethnic and religious background
and each enjoyed a level of wealth insufficient to hold them in the
East, but adequate for the purchase of a town lot or small farm
through their company. From a temporary "Log City," they built a
four-sided, 560-acre town centered around a New England-style
square, reflecting not only a geometric taste for planning but their
common social ideals. This gridwork of values included a faith in
progress that made Galesburg a center for temperance, hydropathy
and antislavery activities in western Illinois. Large hog drives to
Chicago and early crops of popcorn, mustard and canary seed
testify to the importance of market agriculture in this vision of
progress.
The railroad addressed the vision of commercial
agriculture. In 1849, the charter of the Peoria & Oquawka Railroad
Co. projected a link between those towns on the Illinois and
Mississippi rivers that would bypass Galesburg, leaving its future
dependent on Knoxville, the county seat. Quincy investors planned
a Northern Cross Railroad that would also miss Galesburg on the
west. Led by their foremost merchant, Chauncey S. Colton, the
town fathers chartered their own Central Military Tract Railroad
Company which took form in 1852 after Colton's chance encounter
in Boston with two men equally dissatisfied with current railroad
plans in the area—an Iowa director of the P&O and an official of
the Aurora Branch Railroad, which then simply linked that town to
the Galena & Chicago line (later the Chicago & North Western
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Railroad). The three joined forces around a common plan that
would transform the Aurora Branch into the Chicago & Aurora,
extend it across Illinois as the Chicago & Southwestern, and, with
the assimilation of the Northern Cross line, become the Chicago,
Burlington & Quincy Railroad, with Galesburg in the key position
along the east-west route. Soon, Colton happily reported that the
Illinois legislature had granted "absolute self control as to rates &
fares, for our company, free from all subsequent legislation." 5
If the town had gained a railroad, the railroad had also
gained a town. Local historians still puzzle over how the cash-poor
residents of the Mendota-Galesburg route raised the $300,000
demanded by European and East Coast investors. Land for the
depot, yards, and right of way came as a cession from Knox
College. The Northern Cross also insisted on buying $6,000 worth
of additional college lands that the soon-to-be-merged line would
never need, eventually paying with the stock of their then
nonexistent railroad. Resumption of the P&O's construction west
of Monmouth required another vast fundraising effort, later repaid
by the P&O in a rate war against the CMT which continued until its
assimilation. Finally, the CB&Q ignored its pledges to locate its
headquarters there. 6 Alleging "exorbitant rents" in Galesburg, the
company partially removed its offices to Chicago!
Railroad capital fed the town's rapid growth. In the quarter
century after the 1854 arrival of the first train, the line invested
nearly $375,000 in its local operations, and increased its annual
spending there to between $30,000 and $50,000, a regular flow that
spawned numerous projects. By then, the Galesburg Gas, Light
and Coke Company had eight miles of gas mains with 135 street
lamps. Reservoirs on Seminary and West Streets supplemented
twenty local cisterns and piped water to the center of town. A
dozen hydrants could supply the fire brigades that had formed.
Gale's followers built an outstanding school system capped by
Knox College, and boasted an outstanding Philharmonic Society
and a respectable municipal library. In addition to three
newspapers, residents had already published several local histories.
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Traveling lecturers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley,
and Frederick Douglass spoke at Galesburg, which also hosted one
of the 1858 senatorial debates between Stephen A. Douglas and
Abraham Lincoln. After 1870, visitors could stay at the new Union
Hotel, which boasted of having the best accommodations in the
state. 7
Galesburg gained power from such prosperity , and from its
early identification with the Republican party. In 1856, the year that
the new party waged its first national campaign, the town fathers
launched their first attempt to remove the county seat from
Democratic Knoxville. The sixteen-year campaign not only fueled
the old rivalries, but superseded the party allegiances of Knoxville
Whigs and Galesburg Democrats. It ended in 1875 when the courts
resolved a problem with stuffed ballot boxes by awarding the
county seat to Galesburg. 8
However, the easy connection to the exploding metropolis
of Chicago was hardly conducive to preserving Gale's city on a hill.
The railroad brought local farmers into a market that extended
across the region. By 1877, corn grew on almost 6700 of the
township's 18,300 "improved" acres and on 148,000 acres
elsewhere in the county, to total roughly five times the acreage in
oats and spring wheat. Almost 3800 swine rooted in the township
and another 69,000 in the county beyond. Farmers with smaller
holdings of eighty to 320 acres found it increasingly difficult to
compete with larger farms in feeding the Chicago markets. 9 As
land prices continued to rise, the more enterprising and less
scrupulous moved boundary markers and fences or simply forged
deeds and land transfers, establishing the sort of smoldering
grievances and family feuds long remembered in the rural Midwest.
The new economic weight of corn and hogs reshaped the
town itself. Inventive early settlers like H. H. May, George W.
Brown and J. P. Frost made the town a center for the new
agricultural technology and its industries. By the late 1870s, the
windmills of May Brothers, Brown's corn planters, and the steam
engines and related machinery of Frost Manufacturing reached
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uyers in Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia and Japan. Like
the CB&Q itself, one of the new local industries might employ
several hundred workers.
These factories drew labor from sources unlikely to
contribute to a docile work force. Many workers came from the
surrounding countryside, steeped in a growing resentment of an
economic dependence on railroad freighting charges and the
political clout of such enterprises. As early as the 1850s, some
original settlers like Charles A. Hinckley (also called Hinkley)
participated in a local "Farmers' Club" that probably worked to
establish a cooperative grain storage facility at Chicago. It
reorganized as the "Downing Horticultural Society" by 1857 and,
after the war, participated in the State Farmers' Association loosely
associated with the Patrons of Husbandry—the so-called
"Grange." 10
Illinois farmers plowed new ground in their political action
to curb the power of the railroads. They won their first electoral
victories in 1873 with a movement based at Kewanee, less than an
hour down the tracks from Galesburg. Hinckley and the Knox
County delegation to the Association's next state convention helped
to launch a "Farmers' and Peoples' Anti-Monopoly Party" and
placed names in nomination for statewide office, including that of
"Professor" Junius B. Roberts, a Knox graduate then
Superintendent of Public Schools in Galesburg. In November
1874, they forged a local "Independent" or "Liberal" coalition that
commanded over 800 local votes. 11 The rural environs which
shaped the attitudes of many of Galesburg's industrial workers
remained hostile enough to the new corporate ethos to generate
regularly several hundred votes in the country through the rest of
the century for Independent, National, Greenbacker,
Antimonopolist, Union labor and Populist candidates.
A peculiar immigrant tradition also influenced the thinking
of at least half of Galesburg's workers. While the town had only
half a dozen Swedes in 1847, the railroad carried between 2500 and
3000 there by the Civil War and an 1880 estimate placed the figure
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at 3500. Swedes in Galesburg overshadowed the Irish and German
elements prominent elsewhere because of the Bishop Hill
community in neighboring Henry Country. In the six years after
1848, the colony drew at least 1200 pietistic communist dissenters
from the Swedish state church and railroad construction drew
colonists and would-be colonists along its right of way into other
settlements like Galva, Victoria, and Wautaga. Set apart by
language and faith, Swedes in Galesburg and Bishop Hill provided
the initial base for their own publications and mutual aid
associations, some of which outlived the societies elsewhere. 12
Galesburg Swedes constituted a distinctive, if temporary,
underclass. As in Chicago, the first generation remained largely
confined to "jobs calling neither for great skill nor a good
knowledge of English." Eric Johnson, a visitor to Victoria, puzzled
at finding not one "Swedish businessman in this almost exclusively
Swedish colony." At Galesburg, he compiled statistics on 703 adult
male Swedes (which did not include the forty- five Swedes at the
local poorhouse). Johnson found: 16% unemployed; 26% in
menial labor; and 18% in traditional skilled trades, of which only a
handful may have been small-scale industrialists or even selfemployed
artisans. Not one Swedish lawyer or doctor contributed
to the 6% in "white collar" or professional pursuits, and only
fourteen (under 2%) described themselves as merchants. In
contrast, he identified 34% working in the new industries,
including some 270 on the CB&Q, a "large number" at Frost
Manufacturing, and enough at Brown's cornplanter works to
"consider the factory Swedish." 13
In every sense, the railroad and its industrial community
broke the coherent symmetry of the old town. Physically, the depot
and right of way clipped the southeast corner of the old town plan
and construction spilled beyond South street and Knox College. By
1878, residents of once temperate Galesburg slaked their thirst at
any of sixteen licensed saloons or in the widespread illegal trade on
"the wrong side of the tracks." Too, the nature of an industry that
regularly left workers away from home and family nurtured a
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urgeoning red light district. Workmen awaiting organization of
their train left their signal lamps on brothel porches so the engineer
could later find his crew members. 14
Still, amidst the large scale commercial agriculture and
industrialization, the values shaped in a face-to-face society
persisted. Both directors and debtors of East Coast and European
railroad capital chose to operate in Galesburg under the rustic name
of the Farmers' and Mechanics' Bank. New corporate standards did
not immediately redefine the older virtues of fair play, honest labor,
personal choice, self-improvement, and representative government.
Only the stress of events would be needed to reveal the fractured
character of the community's social symmetry.
II
Workers still claimed the rights and privileges of citizenship
that grew from older pastoral and handicraft relations. Minimally,
they expected to remain as free as the owners of capital from
official interference in the exercise of their constitutional and civic
rights. As citizens owning no profitable properties beyond their
own labor, workers initially sought to use those rights in the
workplace, at the heart of the industrialism reshaping their world. 15
The most highly paid, widely traveled and well-respected
wage earners in Galesburg were the railroad engineers. By 1863,
they had formed a division of the Brotherhood of the Footboard
which soon became the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers
(BLE). Despite the company's blacklisting, the union had found
sufficient support to weather the economic hardships after 1873.
Its members on the CB&Q then earned annual incomes of about
$900, above that of smaller railroads in the state but well below that
of engineers on the Rock Island Line. 16
Galesburg's first union faced several serious challenges. As
skilled workers in an industry that employed many other workers in
a variety of capacities, their lot remained tied to that of the yet
unorganized firemen, conductors, and the railyard workers, who
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made little more than common laborers despite specialized
responsibility and experience. More immediately, the depression
that deepened after the financial panic of 1873 moved the CB&Q
to follow the lead of other companies with a planned "reduction of
10% on all salaries that average over $1.00 a day." Despite some
internal dissension and the existence of scattered pockets of
unionism, its top managers expressed "no fear of any trouble with
our employees if it is done with a proper show of firmness on our
part and they see they must accept it cheerfully or leave." Still,
officials kept their plans a closely guarded secret, explicitly
declaring their concern that workers might take the Independence
Day rhetoric of 1877 too literally. 17
The story of the nationwide general strike in July 1877 has
been well told elsewhere. As news of a spontaneous labor rising in
West Virginia on July 17 spread along the tracks, railroad
workers—usually lacking the minimal protection of a trade
union—organized local strikes, often sweeping into action the
unemployed and workers in other industries as well. Both the
CB&Q management and the workers at Galesburg followed the
movement's progress across the country and the former dispatched
its rolling stock ostensibly to Burlington and Quincy, but in reality
to rural sidings away from such expected trouble spots. The local
Republican Register noted of Galesburg workmen that "the avidity
with which they pick up and recite every item of news in relation
to the strikes, shows how keenly they sympathize with the men
engaged in the strike on the other roads." 18
On Tuesday, July 24, news reached Galesburg that the strike
had closed the Chicago operations of the CB&Q. That morning,
they rallied in the City Park (where county authorities had yet to
construct their new courthouse). The BLE then sponsored a "secret
session" for all railroad men—not just the engineers—to discuss
the strike. Representatives apparently left afterwards to bring the
news to their Burlington co-workers. Locally, the strikers held
another public rally at "the Printers' Grounds south of the depot" in
the afternoon. That evening, they reassembled in the City Park for
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a mass meeting featuring an address by Franklin Stephenson
Murphy, the forty-two year old Virginia-born lawyer who had
espoused the local antimonopolist cause. 19
The city fathers of bedrock Republican Galesburg
responded in a remarkably anachronistic fashion. While
disparaging efforts to stop strikebreakers and urging social duty
upon both Capital and Labor, the local editor insisted that the
railroads could afford "living wages" if they eliminated "stealing"
by their owners and defended the workers' right to unionize and to
strike. The mayor met a delegation of strikers as his constituents,
offering "some few words of sympathy" and soothing
apprehensions inspired by the "drilling of the military company at
nearby Altona. As the Register frankly acknowledged "beyond all
question," the community sympathized "strongly" with the strike
movement. 20
Thus assured, the railroad men acted in earnest the next
morning at nine o'clock. Despite later denials by its national
leaders, the BLE at Galesburg clearly assumed leadership of the
strike movement. CB&Q managers, eager to clear the yard and to
protect the identities of strikebreakers, sounded the depot whistle to
end work. Most, "with the exception of those connected with the
passenger trains" and the mail went "quietly to their homes" as
"advised by the leaders in the strike." While some milled about the
depot "quietly discussing" the strike, a union committee entered the
yard to remove "several men" engaged in unloading freight.
Local rail traffic virtually ground to a halt. Strikers wisely
targeted the lucrative freight business, took care to prevent any
indication that they would interfere with the U.S. mail, and freely
issued "written permits" to those passenger trains that reached
Galesburg. The strike committee particularly cooperated with the
transit of Wednesday's passenger train from Quincy and Thursday's
Pacific Express to Chicago, although it required one bound for
Peoria to uncouple all but a few of its baggage cars. (Strikers at
Yates City later stopped this train a second time.) Galesburg
strikers also issued a neighborly permit allowing a previously
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planned "excursion party" by rail to spend a day on the Mississippi
river at Burlington.
The CB&Q assertion that its property was endangered
inspired a meeting of 220 local strikers on Wednesday night at the
BLE hall. The union invited Chief of Police Frank Fowler to hear
their proposal that the saloons be closed for the duration of the
strike and that "a large guard of strikers" be deputized to occupy the
yards and protect the property. While hardly the solution the
railroad officials must have envisioned, Chief Fowler agreed to
both. 21 The next day dawned on large groups of deputized strikers
patrolling the railyards.
By Friday, Galesburg was rife with rumors concerning the
strike's course. A freight arrived from Aurora and another left Buda
for Chicago that morning. In the afternoon, an engine and a way
car prepared to leave the yards "to pick up a train on the way
between Galesburg and Mendota by gathering boxcars placed at the
sidings." When a handful of strikebreakers gathered at the engine
to leave Galesburg, a growing crowd "pleaded strenuously" with
them, and exhausting "their most earnest entreaties," used "an
excessive amount of the vilest abuse" to thwart the CB&Q plan.
Meanwhile, the Republican Register both acknowledged the
"firmer" resolve of the local strike and editorialized about its
imminent end. The paper warned that, despite the real grievances
and the responsible conduct of the strike, "certain turbulent persons
in and out of the striking employees" had been "operating in a highhanded
manner, without any restriction by anybody," and the
"communists, tramps, bummers, dead-beats, and all the baser
elements of society" had already seized Pittsburgh, Chicago, St.
Louis, and Peoria. Prolonged strikes, concluded the Register,
enable the "baser and dangerous elements" to "float to the surface,"
leaving local strikers to choose "between the government and the
mob, between the good citizens and law and order, and the rabble
and disorder and anarchy." 22
The CB&Q's threat to replace strikers brought only "a few
workmen and mechanics" back to the yards on Monday morning.
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An "excited and prodigious crowd" of "anxious and curious
citizens" as well as strikers gathered at the depot. Finding "the
freight-train men, almost without exception" loyal to the strike, the
company abandoned plans to move freight and ran its passenger
trains, often hours behind schedule. The crowd, meanwhile, pelted
a crew of strikebreakers with rotten eggs when it tried to take a train
to Peoria. Despite local successes, the strikers heard ominous news
from those trains that did reach Galesburg. CB&Q railroaders had
returned to work at Aurora, Council Bluffs, Chicago, and
Burlington. Federal troops had occupied St. Louis, and the Emmett
Guards had ended the strike at Peoria. Long concerned about the
movements of National Guard units at Altona, Wataga, Oneida,
Galva "and other points" nearby, local strikers heard rumors that
troops used against striking miners at Braidwood were moving on
Galesburg.
Indeed, the early morning hours on Tuesday brought a
detachment of over forty soldiers from Peoria. Detraining on the
outskirts of town, the troops "silently marched" along the tracks to
the depot. There, dutiful municipal officers met them, and the
mayor "informed the Captain that the services of his company were
not required." Significantly, they had entered town "under the
guidance of a railroad official" and stayed despite the judgment of
local officeholders. This "decidedly martial appearance" made
Galesburg seem "the seat of war." An "unpleasant feeling" swept
"the strikers and their sympathizers," making the crowd "much less
numerous" near the yards. As the CB&Q prepared to resume its
freight operations, "a largely attended meeting" of workers
assembled at the Opera House, discharged the strike committee,
and left individual participants free "to go to work or not as the
spirit moves them." Noting that the CB&Q had already discharged
its workers, the Republican Register urged the railroad to "exercise
lenity" and reported with relief that "the cruel striker war is over." 23
The strike's termination left the community in general
confused as well as relieved. The strikers had avoided any hint of
illegality and had carefully maintained the good will of the
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community and its officers. Steeped in republican civic values, the
town had exacted no sacrifice of status or livelihood on such
prominent antimonopolists as Hinckley, the old settler, or even
Roberts, the supervisor of its public schools. To them, strikers in
St. Louis or Peoria may have seemed to be "communists" and
"looters," but the local militants were their neighbors and fellow
citizens seeking a redress of their grievances. 24 The occupation of
Galesburg railyards by patrols of strikers may have conjured
images of the 1871 Paris Commune for railroad officials in Chicago
but, in the face-to-face republican world of small town America,
such might well appear to be an act of civic virtue.
Regionally, a widespread shock at the government's armed
repression of the 1877 strike provoked a massive political revolt.
Coalitions of labor and farmers' associations forged a Greenback-
Labor alliance the following year, electing scores of candidates,
including fourteen Congressmen. The Socialistic Labor Party
elected officials in Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis and elsewhere,
establishing branches in at least four places along the CB&Q.
Despite their later reputation for conservatism, Illinois Swedes
participated fully in this insurgency, a few joining the
"Scandinavian" branches of the SLP while in communities like
Victoria they remained Greenbackers for years. 25
In Knox County and Galesburg, the local Republican
officials had not cooperated with the railroad or the military,
leaving a small but persistent third party movement with little
encouragement. In September 1886, after twelve years of such
efforts, a county convention of the "National Labor voters"
seriously debated their alternatives. While some insisted on a
doctrinaire Greenbackism, a large faction cited the successes of
pragmatic alliances with the weaker and more accessible of the
major parties. Still others advocated a broad alliance of all forces
opposed to the corporate parties, particularly embracing the "six
labor organizations in the district." 26
Those half a dozen unions of 1886 had taken their place
alongside the Main street businesses near the square. Although the
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local cigarmakers and pipefitters had organized, rail labor provided
the mainstay of the local labor movement, particularly after the
Sante Fe Railroad extended a line through the town. During the
1877 strike, the BLE had organized participants "into different
parties, representing the different classes of railroad employees,"
probably sowing the seeds for the new locals of firemen,
conductors and brakemen. 27
By 1885, the formation in Galesburg of the Knox and
Bennet Assemblies of the Knights of Labor most concerned the
CB&Q. Although these "mixed" assemblies recruited "producers"
of various occupations, the order's recent strikes on the railroads
made it particularly attractive for workers in that industry
unprotected by the craft brotherhoods. The CB&Q management
blacklisted the Knights, but its informers reported that "young men
barely out of their apprenticeship have been decoyed into it, as well
as some of our apprentices." Railroad officials consoled
themselves that few skilled workers in their industry participated,
and that railroaders in general supplied only 150 of the estimated
Galesburg membership of about 400 Knights. 28
Galesburg had reacted to the strike of 1877 and its aftermath
as a self-governing small town rather than as a locally-managing
component of a much larger and expanding corporate order. By the
standards of the railroad, however, the town had failed to defend
the prerogatives of corporate power. 1888 brought the community
another, definitive challenge.
III
The CB&Q strike of 1888 revealed the new status of
working class citizenship. Workers long resented the railroad's
method of computing wages for work over the road, believing that
it cheapened both their identity in the community and the stability
of their families. The BLE and Brotherhood of Locomotive
Firemen responded to management's refusal to negotiate with a
strike call on February 27, 1888. Members now told each other that
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CB&Q stood for "Come, Boys & Quit Railroading" and began
regularly to "congregate in the largest public hall here and when in
session sing songs, listen to violin playing and engage in a regular
frolic." The enthusiastic strike spread and a sympathy strike briefly
closed the nearby Sante Fe yards. Participants, opponents, and
spies left detailed accounts of what historian Donald McMurry
called "one of the most stubbornly contested struggles in American
labor history." 29
Railroad management hoped the strike would mark the final
confrontation and defeat of the four union brotherhoods. Purged of
any officials even remotely sympathetic to the workers' plight, it
expanded its usual security by bringing agents of Allen Pinkerton's
detective service to Galesburg. It also recruited strikebreakers,
housing them southeast of the depot along streets like Cottage
Avenue (known in local labor parlance for years thereafter as "Scab
Alley"). Railroad officials also encouraged strikebreakers to arm
themselves, and promised legal support to those using weapons in
self-defense. 30
Galesburg's city fathers in 1888 showed few signs of the
naive republicanism of 1877. Earlier, the municipal authorities had
deputized working class citizens to secure the railyards; this time,
when the CB&Q sent its own guards not only to protect the
corporation's property, but to patrol the town itself, the city
government compliantly deputized the company's men as a special
city police for the duration of the strike. Despite some misgivings
by individual officeholders and some inexperience in law
enforcement techniques, the city fathers as a group took their place
alongside the defenders of the new corporate order. 31
Workers, in turn, responded sharply to these obvious shifts
in their city government and their community polarized rapidly.
Within days of the strike's onset, gunshots drew "an excited crowd"
to the depot where the police found an unarmed striker shot in the
leg by a pistol-packing strikebreaker. Significantly, they took the
armed man not to the jail but to the new arbiter of local justice, the
"private office" of the CB&Q. An angry town official complained
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to a reporter for the Republican Register that unionists "had been
favored too much" in the paper and sarcastically wondered if it
would print that the young strikebreaker had "jumped on four big
men and attempted to kill them." Authorities took no action against
the gunman who had opened fire, but arrested two strikers charged
with assault. 32
Despite warnings, the Register continued to chronicle
incidents of fisticuffs and gunfire, often sparked by chance
encounters and frequently numbering several in a week.
Empowered as a local police, the CB&Q special force taunted,
threatened, and brawled with striking citizens. The local courts, in
contrast, prosecuted about a dozen cases against workers for
carrying concealed weapons, assault with a deadly weapon, or even
assault with intent to kill. 33 Angry strikers responded to the new role
of the city authorities by reasserting their own prerogatives as
citizens. In the first month of the strike, they documented
harassment by the special police in formal complaints to the city
council. Its inaction led to trade unionist intervention in the city
elections of April 3. While the Republican party remained locally
unbeatable in national and state elections, a proposal to establish
"dry" districts in the city had polarized Galesburg politics for
several years between the Citizens and the "wet" Liberals. This
issue expressed deeply rooted social and ethnic conflicts, but, even
in this small community, the division was quite complex. The
Citizens rallied not only the older, middle class American
Protestants but pietistic Swedes and even saloonkeepers eager to
remove competitors. The pro-Citizen Register cited signs "posted
in one of the saloons, notifying the colored people not to loaf
around there," turning "so large a proportion of the colored voters"
against the Liberals that defeat seemed likely."
Eager to make the city's relationship to the CB&Q the
central issue, the strikers intervened in the election. Railroad
workers entered the ward meetings of the weakest side, usually the
Liberals, and secured the nomination of their own candidates in all
but one ward. "The strikers having the time to put in at the polls,
96

were there in full force," wrote one reporter. "So many workers of
this and other kinds were out at the Fifth ward that the walks were
thronged and the yard crowded. It looked as if a big picnic was
going on. There was also a big force of strikers in the Fourth ward
precincts." The results left the Register to take solace in the 1110
"dry" votes and the total defeat of the nonlabor "wets," assuring
readers that "but for the unexpected element of the strike entering
into the contest, they [the Liberals] would have been licked out of
their boots."
Workers elected two striking engineers to the city council.
Both Peter Erickson, who carried the Fourth Ward 288 to 281, and
Lewis E. Hinckley, who won the Fifth by 210 to 179, remain
obscure figures. Heavily represented among employees of the
CB&Q for years, the Erickson surname had been prominent earlier
in the Bishop Hill community, and there a Peter Erickson had
served in a Union regiment raised in northwestern Illinois. The
Hinckley surname belonged to an old American family long
immersed in the third party agitation of the local farmers. 35 While
possibly less successful in addressing "colored" voters, labor
politics in Galesburg seems to have fused the local legacy of
Swedish communism with an indigenous antimonopolism.
Labor's victory, however, failed to change the city
government's new subservience to the CB&Q. In Galesburg, as
elsewhere, workers' deep mistrust of governmental authority,
usually directed against themselves, tempered their own exercise of
power. The presence of two labor councilmen did expose and
somewhat moderate the behavior of the special police. More
importantly, as the dynamics of economic concentration began to
centralize American political life, local representative institutions
found that often vital decisions affecting their area would be made
by corporate and governmental bodies in Chicago, Springfield, and
Washington. 36
Neither working-class residents nor officeholders could
prevent the arming of strikebreakers and the escalation of violence,
as the strike grew longer and more desperate. Within days of his
97

election, gunshots startled Alderman Erickson in his home on
Spring and Matthews streets. The deep divisions over the strike
complicated the conflicting testimony over what he found when he
rushed outside. Albert Heburg, a twenty-two year old
strikebreaker, had been on his way to the home of his mother,
Erickson's sister. On his way, Heburg encountered and exchanged
insults with Herbert Newall and another striker. One of them
grabbed Heburg, who drew a .38 calibre Smith & Wesson, opened
fire on both strikers, and continued on to his mother's. Bleeding
from the head and calling for a doctor, one of the wounded strikers
stumbled past onlookers, one of whom later explained that "if he
wasn't a striker I would take him in bandage his head up, but if he
was I wouldn't; I was afraid he might shoot me." Finding Newall
in the gutter near death, Erickson took his own nephew into
custody. 37
The city's investigation of the incident reflected the
pervasive influence of the railroad. The police inquiry, conducted
by the CB&Q's special force, consisted largely of warning
witnesses not to discuss the incident with "the local editor of the
Republican Register." Although Erickson, the marshal, and a
doctor found no weapons in Newall's possession, strikebreakers
later reported finding in the yard "cast iron knuckles" stained with
blood which they dutifully took to the real authorities, the company
officials, one of whom returned the weapon to a strikebreaker "to
take care of it." From a private citizen, such a story would have
been rejected as hearsay or treated as an admission of tampering
with possible evidence and criminal obstruction of justice; from
railroad officials, the hearings accepted such tales as legitimate
evidence. The authorities concluded not only that the strikers had
physically attacked Heburg, but that they had done so with arms
and that his life had been threatened. With no recourse, the strikers
held a large procession through Galesburg for Newall's funeral,
where the Rev. J.W. Bradshaw, a reform-minded clergyman,
provided the only prominent reminder of Gale's original vision for
the community. 38
98

Similar methods uncovered and documented the "Dynamite
Conspiracy" among the strikers. According to the CB&Q, shortly
after Newall's murder, small charges detonated under engines
startled strikebreakers in the Galesburg yards on May 16 and 26.
Between late May and early June, the line claimed that such blasts
had also damaged equipment at Eola and Aurora in Illinois and at
Creston, Iowa. Pinkerton agents, also reporting later, claimed to
have found at these scenes small bits of paper traceable through the
Chicago manufacturer to a store in Indiana frequented by union
men. On July 5, the authorities acted at the request of the railroad
to arrest those implicated. At Galesburg, the railroad officials and
detectives took the mayor on a search along the right of way
northeast of the depot. Near Losey Street, the mayor himself found
a small cache of dynamite said to be earmarked by the strikers for
local use. 39
The local context in which the unionists operated certainly
included plausible inducements to violence. The company actively
encouraged strikebreakers to use arms against the strikers. The
municipal government responded by ceding its police and
investigative functions to a powerful and ruthless corporate
authority. The courts had demonstrated a new unwillingness to
protect striking citizens, even when gunned down like Newall on a
quiet residential street. Of course, the small detonations allegedly
set by strikers seemed calculated to frighten rather than to kill,
which makes the accusation more plausible.
Conspiracy charges and vaguely psychological measures of
plausibility often allow contemporaries to set aside the presumption
of innocence and the demands of evidence. The record of the
Pinkertons, the railroads, and even the civil authorities hardly
inspires confidence in their veracity. The uncorroborated and
challenged testimony of a detective hired and paid to get such
results provided most of the information used against the strikers.
Such men also "accompanied" the mayor to the publicly accessible
site of his dramatic discovery. Too, the company's claim that it
could operate trains safely and efficiently with strikebreakers
99

gained credibility if sabotage could be blamed for derailments and
"hundreds of minor mishaps" otherwise "chargeable to
incompetency." 40
Historians must acknowledge that the "evidence" for the
Galesburg "Dynamite Conspiracy" is pathetically thin. Of course,
the authorities never investigated whether this represented an
attempted management set-up, so it should be no surprise that the
evidence indicating this would remain circumstantial as well. Still,
circumstantial evidence against management and its agents was
much stronger than that against labor for several important reasons.
First, the Galesburg charges marked but one of a series of
sensational and unprecedented claims by detectives to have
unearthed "dynamite conspiracies" in the late 1880s. These grew
from the successful prosecution of eight anarchist labor leaders in
Chicago's Haymarket Affair of 1886. The conviction and hanging
for a bomb explosion in police ranks near a rally for the eight-hour
workday inspired similar investigations, trials and prosecutions.
From the start of the strike, some of the CB&Q's partisans had
charged local unionists with "the same spirit that landed [August]
Spies & Co. on the gallows." 41 It is more likely that detectives and
police agencies found an effective charge than that workers became
suddenly and nationally violent.
The indictment targeted veteran unionists rather than young
and less prudent hotheads in the ranks of the strikers. George A.
Clark had started on the CMT, served as sergeant in the
community's regiment during the Civil War, and returned to
become an early member of the BLE; he had particularly irritated
the special police by repeatedly filing formal complaints against
them with the municipal authorities. Another worker active in the
strike, George D. Meily, had actually retired from the railroad. The
two faced criminal charges filed in mid-summer, supplemented
with a November indictment for "conspiracy to do an unlawful
act." 42 Most importantly, the prosecutors offered their own honest
judgment of the evidence. In December 1888, they dropped the
charges of criminal activity entirely and, after several continuances,
100

entered a nolle prosequi in November 1889 on the conspiracy
count. Having been left to linger over the heads of local union
leaders over the duration of the strike, the charges had served their
purpose.
The "Dynamite Conspiracy" dealt a final blow to the strike.
In mid-summer, the strikers overwhelmingly defeated a proposed
settlement. However, the five months of struggle had reduced the
participants to less than 800, about a third of those who had left the
yards in February. Even in Galesburg, which had joined the
western locals in unanimously rejecting the settlement, Pinkerton
agents reported a "fight in the Hall" in which some "threatened to
leave the Brotherhood and never join again, it was on acc[oun]t of
the Dynamite case." Through the summer and fall, the strikers
made continued, insistent demands for support on the national
brotherhoods which grew increasingly resentful of "the ingratitude
of the Q men." Finally, the conservative national leadership of the
BLE convinced its members to capitulate unilaterally, leaving the
other unions to make what settlement they could. On January 8,
1889, the defeated unions ended the strike and the CB&Q merely
agreed to accept the applications for work of former strikers. 43
The bitter ten-month strike contributed directly to the
evolution of modern labor relations. The high price of utterly
defeating this strike taught large concerns that collective bargaining
and arbitration might be a wiser business decision, alternatives all
the more warmly welcomed by the national leaders of the railroad
brotherhoods. Politicians learned the dangers of allowing private
companies to exercise the police power of the community. Despite
the defeat, Galesburg workers sustained their unions and even
formed another half a dozen by 1892 when they organized a citywide
Trades and Labor Assembly. 44
A fundamentally modern civic culture framed the stability
and respectability these new labor organizations gained. It accorded
workers' associations some legitimacy where members labored,
while circumscribing broader activism. Seven months after
electing their aldermen, Galesburg workers were courted by Alson
101

J. Streeter, the presidential candidate of the Union Labor Party. A
former Knox student and a farmer from nearby New Windsor, he
drew large and cheering crowds in Galesburg with his stinging
denunciations of the railroads and his defense of the strike. Still,
the official count records no more third party votes than usual in a
presidential election. 45 Genuinely militant workers had learned to
cheer their agreement with Streeter—or, later, with Eugene V.
Debs, one of the BLE leaders in the 1888 strike—without voting
Union Labor or Socialist. The civic dimensions of the labor
movement faded with a redefinition of working class citizenship.
IV
Galesburg began with the town plan and gridwork of social
relations envisioned by its founders. The railroad and the
commercial-industrial revolution to which it was central broke the
town's physical and social symmetry. The transformation of
agricultural production subjugated farmers to its own needs and the
industrial reshaping of the town rapidly attracted a large,hired work
force of quite different ethnic background from the Yankee
founders.
These developments did not, of course, change the selfperception
of working class citizens, creating a certain unevenness
that textured events nearer the turn of the century. Clearly,
republican standards still informed the roles of both workers and
local authorities in 1877; while allowing that strikers elsewhere
might be tramps, the community viewed those in Galesburg as
neighbors and fellow citizens. By 1888, despite the honestly
conservative efforts of the Republican Register, corporate
standards preoccupied part of the community and its officialdom
which, this time, deputized not their striking fellow citizens to
patrol the railyards but the "special police" of the railroad to patrol
the yards and even the town, leaving it briefly awash in a wave of
violence.
The labor politics of 1885-1888, generally ascribed to the
102

Knights of Labor, represented a working class sense of betrayal by
their civic, if not social, equals. However, Galesburg demonstrates
that organizations widely perceived as conservative and
nonpolitical, such as the BLE, could be closer to the heart of the
insurgency than the Knights; each case merits a closer examination
on its own terms. 46 In any event, local victories revealed the
inability of working class citizens to address class grievances
rooted in the changing nature of citizenship itself. While Erickson
and Hinckley had no power over the growing cooperation of state,
corporation, and secret agents, the Republicans and Democrats
developed new local spokesmen capable of appealing to workers
on the largely nonideological grounds of regional, ethnic, and
cultural competition permissible in the new corporate civic culture.
Unable to attain political victory on a scale needed to make
such gains permanent, workers' organizations abandoned the civic
sphere for a narrower focus on the workplace. As the Galesburg
Trades and Labor Assembly formed in 1892, a shift in values less
tangible than real estate removed the union halls from the heart of
the community. With the new century, Main Street became the
exclusive domain of business interests, which had become eagerly
engaged in creating the illusion that it had always been so.
103

Notes
1. The engineers and firemen shared the building at No. 151 East Main, the conductors and
brakemen at No. 14, and the Knights of Labor at No. 104. See Colville's Directory of the
City of Galesburgh 1887-88 (Galesburgh: Colville & Bros., 1887). This spelling of
"Galesburgh" was sometimes used, as in the 1845 history of Knox cited below, note 7, but
it seems never to have been common and is treated here as a typographical error. Shelton
Stromquist offered a useful introduction to "The Knights of Labor and Organized
Railroad Men" read at the 1979 Knights of Labor Symposium at the Newberry Library,
Chicago, and his more complete study, A Generation of Boomers: the Pattern of Railroad
Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1987).
2. See Leon Fink's Workingmen's Democracy: the Knights of Labor and American Politics
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983) for labor politics in several smaller
communities. For the distinctiveness of labor in such places see also Michael H. Frisch,
Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840-1880
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972) and Daniel J. Walkowitz, Worker City,
Company Town: Iron and Cotton Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-
1884 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978). These generally reflect the influence
of David Montgomery's Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-
1872 (2nd ed.; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981). Recent scholarship tends to
offer new challenges to the views of labor politics and socialism as illusionary diversions
counterposed to trade unionism, a perspective well represented by Gerald W. Grob's
Workers and Utopia: A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement,
1865-1900 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961) and especially Norman J.
Ware's The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860-1895: A Study in Democracy
(2nd ed.; New York: Vintage Books, 1960).
3. Carl Sandburg, Always The Young Stranger (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company,
1953), 99; and Perlman in John R. Commons, et. al., History of Labour in the United
States (2nd ed., 2 vols.; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1946), II, 468. Population
figures for Galesburg, compiled from local sources as well as census records are from
Everything You've Wanted to Know About Galesburg—But Didn't Know Who to Ask: A
County Profile (Galesburg: City Planning Dept., May 1975), A-l.
4. Charles Chapman, et. al., Histoiy of Knox County, Illinois . . . Illustrated (Chicago:
Blakely, Brown & Marsh, Printers, 1878), 624, 625-26. Whitney Cross discusses Gale in
the context of The Burned-Over District: the Social and Intellectual History of
Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (2d ed.; New York: Harper & Row,
Publishers, 1965), 152, 161-69; and Wallace E. Lamb in "George Washington Gale,
Theologian and Educator," (Unpublished EdD diss., Syracuse University, 1949). Other
local histories will be cited as needed, but the 1878 publication date of Chapman's History
of Knox County made it the best description of the Galesburg area at the time of the events
104

discussed in this paper. It is the source for this and the following two paragraphs on the
pioneering experience, 119-20, 142, 146, 151-52, 154, 188, 200, 240, and on social
reform, 201-15, 468, 471, 472, 634-35. For the two-week Knoxville to Chicago hog
drive, and the exotic market crops grown near Galesburg, see 112-18, 440-41.
5. Ibid., 218, 221; "Mr. Colton Thought It Was A Good Idea," in Martin Litvin's Voices of
the Prairie Land (2 vols.; Galesburg: Mother Bickerdyke Historical Collection, 1972),
207, 208-10, 211, 213; and J.P. Tipfer's "The Central Military Tract Railroad Story" in his
The Galesburg Chronicles (Chicago: The Adams Press, 1984), 81, 83.
6. "Mr. Colton," in Litvin's Voices, 210-11, 212-13, 241; Tipfer, "Central Military Tract"
in Galesburg Chronicles, 83-84; and Chapman, History of Knox County, 224. "In all
their railroad construction," wrote Chapman, "the county of Knox has never been called
upon in its corporate capacity to render aid, nor indeed any city or township therein."
John Mack Faragher traced a similar transformation in his Sugar Creek: Life on the
Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
7. Chapman, History of Knox County, 484, 632, 633, 634, and 640. Galesburg's
newspapers as of 1883 included: a small Democratic paper, the Press & People; and
independent Republican organ, the Plaindealer; and the Republican Register which had
daily as well as weekly editions. Colville's Directory of the City of Galesburg 1883-84
(Galesburg: Colville & Bro., 1883), 15. Among the early local histories produced were:
Gale's A Brief History of Knox College, situated in Galesburgh, Knox County, Illinois
(Cincinnati: C. Clark, 1845; Charles J. Sellon's A review of the commerce, manufacures,
and the public & private improvements of Galesburg; containing a brief history of Knox
college, and sketches of the first settlement of the Town (Galesburg: J.H. Sherman, printer,
1857); Rev. Flavel Bascom's A historical discourse: commemorative of the settlement of
Galesburg (Galesburg: Free Press book and Job Printing House, 1866); and George
Churchill's Galesburg History (New York: n.p., 1970 [originally 1876]). For a sample of
lecturers who visited Knox College in Knox Directory, 1837-1963 (Galesburg: Knox
College, 1963), 382-85. Jacob A. Riis recalled his visit in The Making of an American
(2nd ed.; New York: the Macmillan Company, 1919), 385-86.
8. Chapman, History of Knox County, 252-53, 408, 415. Partisan politics certainly
contributed to the rivalry of Democratic Knoxville and Galesburg, which remained Whig
with a few Libertymen or even Free Soilers. As late as 1848, election judges informed
citizens at the county seat that they "didn't allow the d—d Whig Abolitionists" to vote
in Knoxville. Chapman, 404-06. Over time, however, town rivalry seemed to
overshadow party alliegances and Knoxville voters withheld their votes from Democratic
candidates residing in Galesburg and Galesburg Republicans reciprocated in their party.
9. For the role of the city in the region, see William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis:
Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), particularly the dramatic
impact of the railroad on grain and livestock markets, 113-14, 237-39. Chapman's
boosterism in History of Knox County provides the essential data for: agricultural
production, 225, 385-86, 389-93, 395-97, 398, 401, 403, 483, and 484; land prices, 107-
105

08, 144; and industry, 316-17, 521-29, 530-31, 657, 692-93.
10. Ibid., 639. Several clergymen "and some of the most extensive agriculturalists in
Illinois" participated in the effort centered in DuPage, Will, Kendall, Kane, Boone and
Bureau counties. See "Association Farmers in Chicago," New York Daily Tribune, August
6, 1850, p. 6.
11. Solon J. Buck, The Granger Movement: A Study of Agricultural Organization and Its
Political, Economic and Social Manifestations, 1870-1880 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1913), 75, 94-95, 96, 127-29; D. Sven Nordin, Rich Harvest: A History
of the Grange, 1867-1900 (Jackson; University of Mississippi Press, 1974), 177; and,
Chester M. Destler's American Radicalism, 1865-1901 (2nd ed.; Chicago: Quadrangle
Paperbacks, 1966), 8, 60. An interview with Stephen M. Smith of nearby Kewanee is in
James Dabney McCabe [Edward Winslow Martin], History of the Grange Movement or
the Farmers' War Against Monopolies (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company,
1873), 347-73. See also Roy V. Scott, The Agrarian Movement in Illinois, 1880-1896
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962). The Knox County delegation to the State
Farmers' Association is given in "The Convention," Chicago Daily Tribune, June 11,
1874. Chapman's History of Knox County includes some references on delegates like the
old Free Soiler Anson L. Massie, 378, 417, and the Democratic George A. Charles, 186,
283, 287, 418, 419, 601. Another Knox County delegate, Charles L. Roberts, a Yankee
Greenbacker also held office in the Yates City branch (No. 131) of the National Liberal
League according to the directory in the 1880 issues of The Truth Seeker, the freethinkers'
weekly published in New York. On Roberts, see infra, note 22. The party also discussed
whether to nominate Miss Jennie McKinsley of Knox County for state office. Stephen L.
Hanson discussed the composition of the Antimonopolist party in The Making of the Third
Party System: Voters and Parties in Illinois, 1850-1876 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,
1980), 185-87, 189-90, 192. For its local 1874 manifestation, see Albert J. Perry's History
of Knox County, Illinois: Its Cities, Towns and People (2 vols.; Chicago: The S.J. Clarke
Publishing Company, 1912), I, 420, 421.
12. Ernest Elmo Calkins, They Broke the Prairie (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1937), 229. George Swank, Bishop Hill, Swedish-American Showcase: History of the
Bishop Hill Colony (6th ed.; Galva, Illinois: by the Author, 1985), 8, 23, 35, 36, 45, 47.
Bishop Hill raised is own unit in the Civil War, Co. D of the 57th Illinois (Swank, 59), of
which two veterans lived in Galesburg by 1878 (Chapman, History of Knox County, 330-
31). See also Eric Johnson Svenskarne i Illinois, Historiska anteckningar (Chicago:
printed by W. Williams, 1880), 134, 138-39, 140-43, partially translated by Leroy
Williamson as The Swedes in Knox County, Illinois (Galesburg: Knox County
Genealogical Society, 1979), 11, 15-16. See also David C. Schoenwetter's An Abstract of
residential patterns of Swedes, Irish and Germans in Galesburg, Illinois, 1860-1900
(Galesburg: Log City Books, 1978).
13. Ulf Beijdom's Swedes in Chicago: A Demographic and Social Study of the 1846-1880
Migration, trans. Donald Brown (Stockholm: Laromedelsforlagen, 1971), 160; Johnson,
Svenskarne i Illinois, 134-36, 136-37, 156; or Williamson's translation, Swedes in Knox
106

County, 11-12, 13-14, 17-21, 35. The almshouse figures are from Chapman, History of
Knox County, 262.
14. Chapman, History of Knox County, 630. The struggle over alcohol tended to shade
class and ethnic divisions even more deeply. While there may have been pro-temperance
Irish Catholics and anti-prohibition Yankee Congregationalists, these were clearly
exceptions proving the rule in this locality. Galesburg's charter of 1857 permitted voters
to decide whether the town would license saloons and their vote left the town officially
"dry." Municipal authorities, despite a brief lapse in 1872, claimed no power to issue such
permits, but the increasingly pluralistic nature of the community forced reconsideration.
The local branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union opened a Temperance
Coffee Room on Prairie Street in 1875, but failed the following year to prevent a new
charter authorizing liquor licensing. Chapman, History of Knox County, 473, 629-30. For
the crusade of turn-of-the-century Progressives in Galesburg against the city's red light
district. See Miriam C. Larsen, 57,000 Sunsets (Galesburg: Bloomberg Pioneer Museum,
1982), 153, 195,219.
15. Richard Schneirov demonstrated the vital importance of the working class presence in
the metropolitan civic culture. Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins
of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864-97 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
Working class citizenship in the smaller and more face-to-face communities like
Galesburg seems to have been slower in expressing its political alienation from the
community, but far more likely to evoke a civic response when doing so.
16. On the BLE, see Perry, I, History of Knox County, 774-75. For Sandburg's discussion
of his father's working life in a railroad shop, see his Always The Young Stranger, 6-18
passim.
17. For the CB&Q plans, see Robert Bruce's 1877: Year of Violence (2nd ed.; Chicago:
Quadrangle Paperbacks, 1970), 55-56, 221, 237-39, 244, 250, 283-84, 301, 303-04.
18. Articles from the Galesburg Republican Register [hereafter RR], July 28, 1877 provide
the basis of this account of the local strike movement, but see also Knoxville's Knox
County Republican for "The Strikers," August 1, 1877. The Oquawka Spectator ominously
reprinted "Judge Drummon on the Rights of Labor," August 9, 1877. On the strike, see,
in addition to Bruce's 1877: Joseph A, Dacus, Annals of the Great Strikes in the United
States (St. Louis: Scammell & Co., 1877); Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of
1877 (New York: Monad Press, 1977); Marieanne Debouzy, "Workers' Self-Organization
and Resistance in the 1877 Strikes" in American Labor and Immigration History, 1877-
1920, ed. Dirk Hoerder (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 61-77.
19. On the presence of Galesburg strikers at Burlington on July 24, see the Burlington
Daily Gazette, July 25, 1877, quoted in Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers, 175.
Conservative observers told the Republican Register that Murphy's speech had been "ill
advised, inflammatory and filled with bad counsel." On Murphy, see Chapman, History
of Knox County, 696-97. A Frank Murphy in Co. D, Eleventh Virginia, according to the
107

electronic card index posted by the Library of Virginia, Richmond, as on the World-Wide
Web at . Although later disbarred for
several years, Murphy eventually gained reinstatement, RR, March 17, 1888.
20. In addition to the sources cited, see "The Railroad Strike—the Situation Friday," RR,
August 4, 1877.
21. John H. Keiser's Building for the Centuries: Illinois, 1865 to 1898 (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1977) mistakenly states that while Galesburg workers offered themselves
as guards, their offer was refused; the coverage of the strike by the Republican Register
clearly indicate otherwise. In all probability, however, the story that local officials had
refused to deputize the strikers came from the railroad, military, and state officials, who
illegally reversed the judgment of the city authorities. On Fowler, see Chapman, History
of Knox County, 239.
22. "Let us Reason Together," in RR, August 4, 1877.
23. On the final quotes, see "The Situation Monday," RR, August 4, 1877. See also
Chapman, History of Knox County, 381 and, for earlier troop movements, 379, 380 and
382.
24. J.B. Roberts "resigned at the close of the school year in June 1875" and turned up as
a school official in Indianapolis, the cradle of Greenbackism. Chapman, History of Knox
County, 602, also 345 and 580, and Knox Directory, 153, 379. On the radical contours of
"the St. Louis Commune," see David Burbank, Reign of the Rabble: the St. Louis General
Strike of 1877 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, 1966).
25. A modern history of Greenbackism has yet to be written, but the growing secondary
literature is reflected both in Hanson's Third Party System, and Paul Kleppner's The Third
Electoral System, 1853-1897: Parties, Voters and Political Culture (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1979). A directory in the 1878-79 numbers of The
Socialist, the newspaper of the Chicago sections of the Socialistic Labor Party lists
branches at Chicago, Piano, Burlington and Council Bluffs, as well as at Bath (down the
Illinois river from Peoria) and at Davenport. In ethnic terms, there were two
"Scandinavian" sections in Chicago (one of them female) and another in Piano. If
Beijdom is correct in attributing radicalism in the city to Norwegians rather than the
Swedes (Swedes in Chicago, 330-32), the western Illinois Swedes, rooted in the Bishop
Hill experience, provided many exceptions. Johnson, for example found "at least ninetenths
of the Swedes in Victoria are still so-called 'Greenback men'." Svenskarne i
Illinois, 157, or Williamson's translation, Swedes in Knox County, 35. Nearby Yates City
with its branch of the National Liberal League—the secularists' association organized
around the work of such figures as Robert Ingersoll of Peoria—provided another measure
of sentiment for a third party when it projected a National Liberal Party, although it never
materialized.
26. For accounts of local Greenback-Labor activities, see RR, September 11, October 2,
108

23, 1886. Returns are also given in the Knox County Republican, November 10, 1886.
During this same period, H.L. May, the local capitalist associated with the earlier farmers'
movement, participated in 'The Freight Association," a body much like the Antimonopolist
Freight Associations which began organizing after 1881. RR, March 3, 1888.
27. Perry, I, History of Knox County, 775. A Steam Fitters' Union at work on the new
courthouse negotiated for an eight-hour day. RR, May 15, 1886.
28. The local affiliates of the Knights of Labor, three "mixed" assemblies were No. 2719
"Knox Assembly" and No. 3371 "Bennet Assembly" at Galesburg and No. 4182 at
nearby Knoxville. Guide to the Local Assemblies of the Knights of Labor, comp., Jonathon
Garlick (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982), 79, and Colville's Directory . . . 1887-88,
38. Stromquist's A Generation of Boomers quotes R. W. Colville's 1885 report to the
CB&Q on Galesburg membership in the order on 65, with a table on 66, and a discussion
of the community's importance in the organization of the order on the railroads, 179.
Donald L. McMurry discussed the impact of CB&Q blacklisting of the Knights in The
Great Burlington Strike of 1888: A Case History in Labor Relations (Cambridge: Harvard
University press, 1956), 16-17. One of the strikers, thought that many members working
for the CB&Q left over the issue. See Charles H. Salmon, The Burlington Strike . . . The
Great Dynamite Conspiracy (Aurora: Press of Bunnell and Ward, 1889), 112.
29. McMurry, Great Burlington Strike of 1888, 4, and also 16, 17, 27. For the slogan,
Sandburg, Always The Young Stranger, 99, and singing, the Galesburg Tribune, March 3.
1888, quoted in Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers, 61. On Galesburg in the strike, see
also Salmon, The Burlington Strike, 127, 128 and another account by a veteran of the
strike, John A. Hall, The Great Strike on the 'Q' (Chicago and Philadelphia: Elliott &
Beezley, 1889), 28, 43, 47-48, 50-53, 60, 84-85. M.L. Scudder wrote an account of the
strike for the use of the CB&Q management. On the movement's spread, see "Strike on
the Sante Fe," RR, March 17, 1888 and, for background, Tipfer's "How the Sante Fe
Came to Galesburg" in Galesburg Chronicles, 29-64.
30. McMurry, Great Burlington Strike of 1888, 183, 184, and Sandburg, Always The
Young Stranger, 99. One of the nine bundles of Pinkerton reports in the CB&Q records
now at the Newberry Library in Chicago had been filed from Galesburg, 315.
31. Inexperience in the new standards of institutional deception explains two arrests of
the unfortunate W.T. McDonald, apparently a Pinkerton agent for "falsely [impersonating
another." See Cases 1247, 1248 for March 2, April 13, 1888 in the MS Vol. 7 of Knox
County Criminal Records (October 17, 1887-March 4, 1891), 107-08, 130. One
councilman doubted the wisdom of undermining the efforts of the strikers—"some of the
best citizens of the place"—and warned that the city's involvement might make it liable
for anything the special police might do, but the city attorney incorrectly informed the
council that Galesburg would be "not responsible . . . unless it endorsed such acts." See
the council meeting reported in RR, March 10, 1888 which also editorialized "Let the
Strike be Ended," while publishing letters by correspondents like one from the "Log City"
north of town who wished success to the CB&Q and "that the strikers remain well and
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happy in their retirement." For even more hostile accounts, see the Burlington Saturday
Evening Post, March 3, 1888 which expressed shock that the strikers would "go so far as
to fix the price per mile for both engineers and firemen." That of April 14 repeated the
CB&Q story that the strike had "totally collapsed."
32. A report on this initial incident appeared in the RR, March 24, 1888.
33. Such clashes, sometimes armed encounters, took place regularly through the spring
and summer. See, for example, "A Shooting Episode," RR, June 9, 1888, and Salmon, The
Burlington Strike, 400-09.
34. Citizens filed complaints against the special police in the council meetings reported in
RR, April 14, 21, 1888. Initially, authorities may have replied to citizens' formal protests
by filing of criminal charges against them. See Cases 1128, 1130, 1199, 1248, 1288.
1289, 1290, 1291, 1292, 1310and 1311, filed on April 13, June 8, 13, and November 12,
1888 in the previously cited volume of Knox County Criminal Records, 128, 129, 130,
139, 140, 155, 171. Cases 1279, 1280, 1292 where the accused were released on their
own recognizance or where charges were dropped seemed to have involved non- strikers
or, perhaps, strikebreakers involved in such clashes. For the discussion of the election in
this and the following two paragraphs, see "Citizens' Convention" and "Liberal
Primaries," RR, March 31, and "City Election," RR, April 7, 1888.
35. Colville's Directory lists the labor aldermen for 1883-84, 75, 90 and 1887-88, 152,
172. For Charles, N.P. and A. W. Ericson—all locally well-known Swedish employees of
the railroad at Galesburg, see Johnson, Svenskarne i Illinois, 449-50, or Williamson's
translation, Swedes in Knox County, 62. Peter E. Erickson enlisted as a private from
Morris, Illinois March 3,1862 in Co. H, 53rd Illinois. Adjutant General, State of Illinois,
Roster of Officers and Enlisted Men (9 vols.; Springfield: State of Illinois, 1900) which
material is posted on the WWW as part of the Civil War Research Database at
. A Charles Erickson was, incidentally,
an officer of the Scandinavian branch of the SLP in Chicago according to the directories
in The Socialist. Hinckley's name is sometimes given as "Louis" as well as "Lewis."
36. See Fink, Workingmen's Democracy, 224-25.
37. This and the following paragraph are based largely upon "Shot to Death," RR, May 5,
1888, although Salmon discussed the incident as well in The Burlington Strike, 408-12.
Heburg's warrant is filed as Case 1282 in Knox County Criminal Records, 142.
38. The Rev. J.W. Bradshaw, who presided over Newall's funeral, had also delivered
lectures on such topics as "The Labor Problem" and other social issues. Before the close
of the strike, he moved on, perhaps under pressure from his church. RR, March 10, 17,
September 29, 1888. See also, for Newall, Colville's Directory . . . 1887-88, 216.
39. McMurry, Great Burlington Strike of 1888, 193-94, and for accounts in the RR, see
infra, note 39.
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40. Salmon, The Burlington Strike, 397. He also reported a series of accidents during the
strike, chargeable to the lack of experience and skill among the strikebreakers. 385-87.
The RR regularly reported such tragedies as the "Death by the Wheels," May 26, 1888.
See also Hall, The Great Strike on the 'Q', 88-93, and McMurry, Great Burlington Strike
of 1888, 198-99, 202-03, and, quoting the Pinkerton agent, 200. McMurry thought the
strikers to have been possibly guilty.
41. "An Outside View" by a former Galesburg resident writing from Denver. RR, April 7,
1888. The events in Haymarket Square clearly moved people in and out of the labor
movement in Galesburg. The local Democratic Press & People had warned against
making martyrs of the anarchists by their judicial murder in an editorial reprinted by the
shocked Republican Register, September 4, 1886. In 1887, Illinois had passed the Merritt
Conspiracy Act of 1887, but it is unclear as to whether this is the statute under which the
authorities acted in Galesburg. Keiser, Building for the Centuries, 241.
42. On the local impact of the incident, see articles in the RR: "The Dynamite Case," July
14; "Sensational Developments," July 21; and, "The Conspiracy Case," August 11, 1888.
See also Hall, The Great Strike on the 'Q', 91 and Salmon, The Burlington Strike, 439.
George A. Clark enlisted from Galesburg August 14, 1861 as a sergeant in Company E,
33rd Illinois and was discharged for disability December 6, 1862. For Clark's
involvement in the complaint to the council, see its meeting discussed in RR, April 14,
1888. The authorities apparently filed charges against these men for criminal activities as
Cases 1296, 1297 and 1298 without putting them in writing as a matter of record; these
three cases were noted as striken on December 29, 1888. The People v. George A. Clark,
George D. Meily, John A. Bauereisen and John A. Bowles for "a conspiracy to do an
Unlawful Act" was recorded as Case 1313 on November 15, 1888, and the state entered
its nolle prosequi on November 5, 1889. Knox County Criminal Records, 175, 179-80,
188, 320, and 372.
43. McMurry, Great Burlington Strike of 1888, 200, 228, 241, and also 228-31, 234, 235,
239-41, 243-44, and 251; Salmon, The Burlington Strike, 431; and Hall, The Great Strike
on the 'Q', 99-109.
44. McMurry, Great Burlington Strike of 1888, 279, 286. By 1892, carpenters, printers,
tailors, bricklayers, and masons, painters, and decorators, and a ladies' auxiliary to the
trainmen had organized in Galesburg. That year, local labor organizations formed the
Galesburg Trades and Labor Assembly which supported its own local Labor News by
1895. Perry, History of Knox County, 1775-77,781.
45. Alson Jenness Streeter, a former Knox student and a farmer from nearby New
Windsor, had a long history in the third party efforts by the time of his nomination for
president by the Union Labor Party in 1888. Streeter campaigned as a pro-labor advocate
of the right to organize and for clemency to the Haymarket anarchists, holding a large
audience for two hours at Galesburg's skating rink and leading a huge torchlight parade
through town to Knox College. Local strikers would have been in the crowd when Streeter
denounced the corporate reshaping of American politics from the spot where, thirty years
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efore, Lincoln had denounced the reshaping of national life by the expansion of slavery.
Local efforts to organize the Union Labor Party are reported in the RR, June 23, July 14,
25, 28, October 21, 1888. See also Alfred W. Newcombe's "Alson Jenness Streeter—An
Agrarian Liberal," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 34, 1946). Streeter had
been a friend and pallbearer of Chauncey Colton, who had first brought the railroad to
Galesburg. See "Mr. Colton," in Litvin's Voices, 247. Also Knox Directory, 153. The
strike of 1888 proved "a critical turning point" in the thinking of Eugene V. Debs about
the labor movement, leading him toward the idea of "One Big Union" in the industry and,
ultimately to leadership of the American Railway Union and finally to socialism. Nick
Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: Unversity of Illinois Press,
1982), 79, also 74-82. The CB&Q payroll records note that 276 employees in Galesburg,
Burlington and Creston received discharges and "Time Given" for joining Debs' ARU.
Stromquist's A Generation of Boomers, 94. On Labor Day, 1900, Galesburg unionists
joined others in the region at Canton, Illinois to hear Debs, then the Socialist presidential
candidate. Perry, History of Knox County, 1779.
46. Although concerned with several case studies, Fink also compiled what he
acknowledges to be an incomplete list of generally unstudied "Knights of Labor Political
Tickets, by State or Territory, 1885-88," Workingmen's Democracy, 28-29. A quick
comparison with Garlick's Guide shows that the order is not known to have even existed
in some places where such labor campaigns took place. Neither the Guide nor a modern
state map reveals Milburn in Connecticut, Fayette City and Kendalia in West Virginia,
Berlin Mills in New Hampshire, or Kanawha Falls in Virginia, where Fink's sources
mention labor parties. The Guide gives no known assemblies as a basis for political
activities listed by Fink at Salem, Marion County, Illinois; DePere, Brown County,
Wisconsin; and, Mountain Cove, Fayette County, West Virginia. (Likely, two of these
locations refer to the Falls of the Kanawha in West Virginia and nearby "Mountain Cave,"
the site of an antebellum spiritualist settlement still active in national reform circles as late
as the 1870s.) A further comparison reveals that the Knights never seemed to reach into
Boone and DuPage counties, Illinois, where labor tickets took the field at
Belvidere and Batavia, while Knights organized at Las Animas in Colorado, Marion in
Indiana, and St. Paul, Minnesota, only in 1890 and 1891, after the insurgent labor parties
are noted. (Guide, 63, 75 and 28, 98, 268). Not until after 1886 are Knights known to have
had assemblies at such sites of third party activities as: Prestonville, Kentucky; Willow
Springs, Missouri; Washington, New Jersey; and, Statesville and Burlington, North
Carolina. Added to this category might be the aforementioned Berlin Mills and Fayette
City if they refer to Berlin Falls in Coos county, New Hampshire and Fayette Station in
Fayette county, West Virginia. Conversely, the order had collapsed by 1886 at Somerset,
Massachusetts, Ashtabula, Ohio, and Ottawa, Kansas, which are listed as supporting labor
insurgencies. In short, many of the "labor parties" ascribed to the Knights had no
demonstrable connection to the Knights and were probably more based on local
Greenback persistence than any clear "labor" base.
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