"The Cruel Striker War" - NIU Digital Projects

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
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