"The Cruel Striker War" - NIU Digital Projects

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
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