"The Cruel Striker War" - NIU Digital Projects

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