"The Cruel Striker War" - NIU Digital Projects

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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