"The Cruel Striker War" - NIU Digital Projects

urgeoning red light district. Workmen awaiting organization of
their train left their signal lamps on brothel porches so the engineer
could later find his crew members. 14
Still, amidst the large scale commercial agriculture and
industrialization, the values shaped in a face-to-face society
persisted. Both directors and debtors of East Coast and European
railroad capital chose to operate in Galesburg under the rustic name
of the Farmers' and Mechanics' Bank. New corporate standards did
not immediately redefine the older virtues of fair play, honest labor,
personal choice, self-improvement, and representative government.
Only the stress of events would be needed to reveal the fractured
character of the community's social symmetry.
II
Workers still claimed the rights and privileges of citizenship
that grew from older pastoral and handicraft relations. Minimally,
they expected to remain as free as the owners of capital from
official interference in the exercise of their constitutional and civic
rights. As citizens owning no profitable properties beyond their
own labor, workers initially sought to use those rights in the
workplace, at the heart of the industrialism reshaping their world. 15
The most highly paid, widely traveled and well-respected
wage earners in Galesburg were the railroad engineers. By 1863,
they had formed a division of the Brotherhood of the Footboard
which soon became the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers
(BLE). Despite the company's blacklisting, the union had found
sufficient support to weather the economic hardships after 1873.
Its members on the CB&Q then earned annual incomes of about
$900, above that of smaller railroads in the state but well below that
of engineers on the Rock Island Line. 16
Galesburg's first union faced several serious challenges. As
skilled workers in an industry that employed many other workers in
a variety of capacities, their lot remained tied to that of the yet
unorganized firemen, conductors, and the railyard workers, who
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