Should have been posted yesterday

...both because it was date specific, being a link to a This Day in Labor History post over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, and because yesterday was Bastille Day and Woody Guthrie's birthday. Consider it part of the long-standing desire to re-connect the foundational republican revolutions with the working class, the labor movement, and to place it's full realization only in la république sociale (no, 'welfare state' is not the English equivalent).

 

On July 14, 1877, the Great Railroad Strike began in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
After the Civil War, industrialists engaged in an enormous rail building program. Much of this was funded through shaky and corrupt means, leading to the Panic of 1873. When the bubble burst in 1873, many railroads went bankrupt and those who survived forced workers to bear the brunt of cutbacks. Throughout the nation, rail workers became increasingly angry. Feeling like they had no power to lead dignified lives and betrayed by the new capitalist system of the age, desperation set in....

Thomas Alexander Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, said that strikers should receive “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.” His hopes were answered in Pittsburgh on July 21 when militiamen fired on strikers, killing 20. In response, workers went ballistic, burning 39 buildings and over 1400 rail cars. The next day, militamen struck again, killing another 20 workers. In Reading, state troopers killed 16 people. In Chicago, nearly 20 died after the mayor called for a volunteer militia to crush the strike.

Judge Thomas Drummond of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ordered federal marshals to protect the railroads from the strikers, saying ” “A strike or other unlawful interference with the trains will be a violation of the United States law, and the court will be bound to take notice of it and enforce the penalty.” Finally, President Rutherford B. Hayes called out the U.S. military to end the strike, setting another precedent–that the federal government would openly side with corporations over workers, no matter how legitimate their grievances.

What is often not appreciated is the degree to which the militia/National Guard system of the post-bellum, Gilded Age, and early 20th century was the military arm of organized and consolidated capital. There was a remarkably tight integration between the National Guard, the army, and the organized business class: many of the National Guard units were

"directly funded and equipped by big industrialists or associations of businessmen...[,] were staffed or lead by businessmen or middle-class professionals...[and] in some states, like Pennsylvania, large corporations made a point of ensuring that those who commanded the militia were sympathetic to their interests.... Following the wave of labor unrest in 1886, the regional commander, General Schofield, arranged for leading industrialists to raise $156,890 to purchase land for a new fort a few miles north of the city so that federal troops could quickly enter Chicago....During the Pullman strike, the federal troops in Chicago were under the command of General Miles. When Miles was given overall command of the army in 1896, businessmen raise $50,000 to buy him a suitable home in Washington" (Robin Archer, Why is there no labor party in the United States, p.122).

This reorganization of the militia system and its integration with organized capital and industry was undertaken as a result of the 1877 strike.

"[The militias] were revived and expanded in the wake of the 1877 railway strike in order to meet the demands of employers. Now known as the National Guard, the primary purpose of this reorganization was to ensure that state governments would have sufficient military strength to quickly suppress industrial unrest. Thus, the interests of militia forces became intimately linked with the interests of major employers" (Archer, p.122).

 I may be mistaken, but the first militia unit in the United States to carry the name National Guard was the Seventh Regiment of the National Guard, which adopted this name in honor of the French revolutionary Garde nationale during Lafayette's visit to America in the 1820s (there is a plaque at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, the details are only dimly recalled). So there is irony. New York was becoming the center of capital and industry, of the organizational hub of Republican cultural, social, and political hegemony (on this, see Bernstein's The New York City Draft Riots). The term National Guard is nationalized, the Guard deployed against the working class, the Revolutions of France and America both re-constituted as liberal, propertied, and ultimately conservative revolutions.

Central Park Monument to 7th Regiment, New York National Guard (107th US Infantry from WWI)