Irons-led District 101. 49
Yet, as Case indicates, the labor forces that did battle against Gould’s railroad empire also seized on threats of the potential employment of Chinese and convict workers to burnish the movement’s free-labor message. The actual presence of these allegedly “unfree” competitors was rather minimal. Still, the Central Pacific Railroad had turned to Chinese laborers in the 1860s, some Texas newspapers had proposed using them as a goad to spur the efficiency of emancipated slaves, and Gould had replaced striking coal miners with Chinese in an 1874 dispute. Amid rising fears, moreover, the wives of railwaymen in Texas had in several instances boycotted Chinese laundries because they competed with white washerwomen. Similarly, while most Texas and Arkansas convicts were overwhelmingly leased to farms and plantations, the railroads also hired a trickle of white prisoners for odd jobs. 50
In the circumstances of spreading wage and job cuts and a manipulative and cunning management from afar, however, the “dread of dependence” was palpable for both the laboring and small merchant class of the region. So it was that the strikers, white and black, initially enjoyed strong support from the local press and elected officials of surrounding communities. In Sedalia, Missouri, center of strike strategy, the workers formed their own guard unit to protect idled railroad property, and in Parsons, Kansas, the local paper found nothing wrong with union men keeping would-be strike-breaking “ ‘tramps’ away from the shops.” 51 In both March and September 1885, Knights of Labor mobilizations brought the Gould railway network to heel: in both cases railroad management sat down with labor representatives, withdrew cuts, and rehired fired union stalwarts for what appeared to be an extended commitment to industrial peace. The same period witnessed a gathering independent labor politics in communities around the railroad region. Altogether, the workers’ actions bespoke a most buoyant expansion of free labor ideals: “these men conceived of “free labor” as at once economic, cultural, and political—freedom meant dignity, stability, a fair return for labor, a producer’s claim on the workplace itself, and the opportunity to provide for families and to be public actors as worker citizens.” 52
Yet the constraints on the free-labor express soon came to the fore. When Gould’s general manager, R. M. Hoxie, turned away from arbitration and openly dared the Knights to break a court injunction imposed on actions against a road in receivership, he punctured the broad but shallow base behind the industrial upheaval. As court orders cleared strikers from shops and workhouses, the skilled railway brotherhoods deserted striking trainmen and shopmen. Then, when Gould himself avoided a face-to-face encounter with General Master Workman Terence Powderly in March 1886, the union forces faced a cruel dilemma: back off or up the ante of confrontation by means of a wider walkout and sympathy actions. When Martin Irons and the District 101 leadership chose the latter option, they split not only the earlier cross-class regional coalition behind the strikers but the Knights of Labor as a whole. Violent seizures of trains, armed exchanges with strikebreakers and company detectives, and ultimate resort to the state militia in Ft. Worth, Parsons, and East St. Louis punctuated a month of industrial turmoil that ended in a crushing defeat of the union forces. 53 Though the railroad upheavals left an opening for new, biracial, pre-populist political coalitions across the region, they left scant legacy of workplace organization. 54
In the end, the violence of the Southwest Strike exposed the contradiction between “free labor” as interpreted by workers themselves and “freedom of contract” as interpreted by the courts. By the midpoint of the southwestern railway strikes, the courts were interpreting even peaceful efforts to curtail strikebreaking as a threat to the freedom of contract and had responded to requests for injunctive relief beyond an initial focus on roads that were bankrupt and under the supervision of federal judges. There was, in short, nothing logically “inherent” about the expanded power of the judiciary: up to 1886, courts had been more self-restrictive in their interventions; beginning with the Southwest Strike, they became much more sympathetic to employer complainants. 55
There is no denying the tensions that Gilded Age workers experienced with the application of free-labor doctrines to labor-management relations. Still, it was not just the justices who embraced the “sanctity” of the employment contract. Organized labor, too, for the most part did not reject but rather embraced the labor contract as a vessel of influence in the labor market. In its view, the legalism of contracts needed only to be extended to the group rather than individual rights of employees. As union-friendly legal giant Louis Brandeis explained three years before his appointment to the Supreme Court: “The employee must have as much power and as much freedom in making a contract with the employer as the employer has in making a contract with him, and for that purpose it is necessary that employees should be bound together in some union; because the individual employee is ordinarily helpless against the employer.” 56 Whatever its specific terms, the contract explicitly conferred union recognition, the crux of legitimacy. That it served just that purpose was all too apparent, for example, to Charles Francis Adams, president of the Union Pacific Railroad. In earlier philosophical musings, Adams had allowed that there needed to be some adjustments to allow the “representative, republican system of government” to catch up to the “corporate industrial system,” and he even accepted a role for government in tempering railroad monopolies and unfair market competition. By 1891, however, he was notably bristling about the countervailing power and “excessive regulation” that railroad unionists had brought to bear on his business by substituting collective bargaining for the individual employment contract. 57
The coal industry proved the prime site for the development of what historian David Brody has called “the logic of workplace contractualism”; nowhere else were the “jealously held prerogatives of American management so constrained by contractually defined job rights.” As early as the 1860s, Pennsylvania anthracite miners had shrewdly embraced “market unionism,” calculatingly using work stoppages to reduce the coal supply and thus drive up prices. The movement notched a major breakthrough with the first “joint conference” in the bituminous fields in 1897 that established competitive wage scales across differentiated regions (except for the unions’ Achilles heel of West Virginia). It was precisely the contract system—at least when sustained by a militant rank and file—whom a latter-day Wobbly credited for turning “plain, humble, submissive [creatures] into … men.” 58
Perhaps the other most famous embrace of the labor contract and market unionism—this at the other end of the industrial hierarchy from coal miners—occurred among turn-of-the-century garment workers. In New York City the predominantly female shirtwaist strike of 1909 (or “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand”) combined with an industry-wide Cloakmakers’ strike the following year produced the Protocol of Peace—rationalizing a chaotic industry with standardized wages, hours, and working conditions, and ultimately corralling the larger manufacturers into a deal akin to those hatched by the mineworkers. Gaining a more stable and efficient labor force in exchange for higher wages, the major clothing manufacturers for an extended period bought into a system that historian Colin Gordon calls “regulatory unionism,” a system that contemporary labor journalist Benjamin Stolberg defined as “a sort of joint industrial syndicate of boss and worker.” 59
Finally, there was likely no more thorough—or inventive—labor adaptation of free-market principles than that of American merchant seamen, as reflected in their venerable leader Andrew Furuseth and his signature accomplishment, the Merchant Seamen’s Act of 1915 (aka La Follette Act). The “unfreedom” of the seamen—in particular, their lack of the right to quit during the course of a contract as well as their susceptibility to physical punishment by ship captains—propelled the public face of the desired maritime labor reforms. But here was a case where workers skipped nimbly from throwing off the last vestiges of industrial “vassalage” to a favored place within the global wage system, and all in the name of “free labor.”
To elaborate, for decades, U.S. seamen watched their numbers on the high seas plummet as merchants (including American ones) took advantage of less-regulated and lower-waged foreign-flag vessels through which to deliver international
