"The Cruel Striker War" - NIU Digital Projects

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
86