The Great Cowboy Strike, page 15
Workers responded in Wyoming much as they had done in Texas. Key strike leader Oscar Hite Flagg—Jack Flagg to his neighbors—had managed to set aside a modest herd of his own, which became the core of a common herd that included the cattle of other blacklisted strikers. Flagg had been as much of a Southerner as Harris had been. His father, George H. Flagg, had joined what became the Second Virginia in April 1861, got elected to a second lieutenant a year later, and took command of the unit in early 1864. Nevertheless, his rheumatism landed him in a Richmond hospital as the capital fell. Jack remained close enough to his family to return home regularly.13 In the aftermath of the 1886 strike, Flagg led the most victimized strikers into the same kind of cooperative effort Tom Harris had initiated in Texas.
One of Flagg’s closest associates in these activities was Nathan D. Champion. A Texas-born loner a few years older than Flagg, he had come north with the cattle business in 1881 and had decided to stay. At the time of the strike, he was working as a cowboy and surely participated, perhaps even helping to lead the work stoppage.
Any hope of survival for the strikers, if not success, would require organization. In the Southwest, the Northern New Mexico Small Cattlemen and Cowboys’ Union failed. Cowboys also considered joining the successor to the old Industrial Brotherhood. “The cowboys have evidently been reading the newspapers,” wrote the Cheyenne Transporter, “hence they follow the steps of the Knights of Labor. We have not learned if they accomplished their purpose.” Even as the Transporter speculated on this, cowboys participated in a mixed assembly at Lander in Fremont County, Wyoming.14
Sullivan focused on the problem directly. The employers, he pointed out, have “one of the strongest and most systematic and, at the same time, despotic unions that was ever formed to awe and dictate to labour.” Cowboys like Sullivan hoped for the success nationally of Henry George and his views, the potential of the new workers parties, and the prospect that a revitalized Knights of Labor could spread across the West.15 The Knights came to play a central role in the events of 1886.
The Wider Labor Movement: Railroaders to Musicians
The industry so intimately associated with the beef bonanza experienced its own labor strife in 1886. Moreover, the impact of action by rail labor proved to be far more significant than anything the cowboys might do to spread trade unionism, the idea of a strike, and fear of the dire consequences of their failure.16 In many respects, if the railroads had first given rise to the cattle trade, the rapid and extreme impact of the beef bonanza made the railroads all the more important and rapidly transformative. Still, as with the cowboys, the industry created a workforce of largely single transient men around a less transient, though also disproportionately single, core of workers. The Chinese filled many of these jobs and were kept isolated in a distinctive working-class subculture, sometimes operating under conditions comparable to slavery.
At the time, Jay Gould owned nearly 12 percent of the nation’s railroad tracks, including the Union Pacific, Missouri Pacific, and Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroads. Taking on Gould gave the Knights of Labor unprecedented attention and popularity. However, the announcement by the Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific that it would implement a series of pay cuts of 10 to 20 percent and reimpose a ten-hour workday in the shops made it unlikely that a conflict could be averted.
On March 7, 400 workers in Sedalia walked off the job. John S. Marmaduke, who had destroyed those railroads as a Confederate general, sought to serve them as Missouri’s newly elected governor, but he balked at sending the militia to break the strike. The authorities intervened at every other level to do so and, eventually, the company accepted compromises on every point but an agreement not to cut the wages of its workers, which it rejected as “dictatorial.” In August, more strikes broke out when the railroads closed their shops to lock out union members, reopening them with a newly hired or rehired workforce. A native Missourian, Joseph R. Buchanan of the Labor Enquirer in Denver came back to help organize the strike.
Within days, the strike spread across the region. The management fired a member of the Knights in Marshall, Texas, for allegedly attending a union meeting on company time. Discontent over wages, hours, and working conditions inspired the local Knights to walk out in sympathy. Across the Missouri Pacific and Union Pacific, their coworkers hoped to show their strength as well.
The pressure to call a mass strike became too great for Martin Irons, the tragic and enigmatic figure at the center of the movement. A native Scot, he had landed as a boy in New York in 1844. He later moved on to New Orleans, then to various locations in Kentucky, where he married in 1852. By 1859, he had reached Missouri, where he lived in St. Louis and, later Richmond. By 1880, he became involved with the Knights of Labor and quickly joined the regional leadership of the newly booming organization in the Southwest.17
Consistent with the aims of the old Industrial Brotherhood, African Americans joined the Knights of Labor in significant numbers, particularly in Arkansas and Texas. Local Knights understood that they needed black organizers and leaders to recruit African American members, who had been stung often enough by white leaders. Years later, Patrick Cassity recalled his experience in the 1886 strike as characterized by a remarkable level of interracial cooperation in the rail yards of Palestine, Texas.18 Predictably, though, such experiences tended not to be universal and rarely lasted long.
On March 19, Terence V. Powderly, the Grand Master Workman of the Knights, met in Kansas City with other Knights, railroad officials, and the governors of Kansas and Missouri to see if they could negotiate a settlement. After two days, the effort fizzled, and the Great Southwest Railroad strike rolled on to move over 200,000 workers in Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, and Texas. That made for twice the numbers estimated nationally for the earlier 1877 rail strike. Nor were the workers ready to accept intimidation.
Still, Gould was determined to make no concessions and began bringing in strikebreakers. Then, too, the Brotherhood of Engineers refused to honor the strike, and its members kept working. This time, Gould charged the strikers with “union violence” against strikebreakers and the seizure and destruction of railroad property. The governors of Missouri and Texas dutifully mobilized state forces and placed them at the service of the railroad, though those from Kansas refused. Under state protection, Pinkerton agents—often convicted criminals—went about beating and intimidating strikers. Gould reportedly sneered, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” and procured injunctions to prevent strikers from interferring with trains run by strikebreakers.
The railroad got the authorities to start enforcing these injunctions around Fort Worth. On April 3, the bosses ran a train south of Fort Worth to where the Missouri Pacific intersected the line of the Fort Worth & New Orleans, known locally as Buttermilk Junction. City Marshall Timothy “Longhaired Jim” Courtright brought a team of deputies to secure the line. The train driver saw that the switch had been thrown as the train approached the intersection, and the deputies jumped down to encounter half a dozen armed strikers or supporters. These included a switchman named Tom Nace, the one-armed peanut vendor Frank Pierce, who demonstrated real skill with a Winchester, and John R. Hardin, a carpenter described “as an out and out Communist.” In twelve to fifteen minutes, the two sides fired about a hundred shots. The strikers shot three of the deputies, including Richard Townsend, who did not survive. After the incident, the authorities charged seven of the strikers of murder, though, in the end, three were acquitted, three avoided capture, and only one was convicted.19
Perhaps the most prominent of the strikers was Nathan Morris Lovin. One local account claimed that he had gotten away because he “had never been anything more than a bushwhacker and hired gun,” and the authorities “could forgive him sooner for that than for being a socialist or union organizer, neither of which he never was.” In fact, Lovin was the Mississippi-born Master Workman of a local assembly of the Knights and a veteran of the Eighteenth Mississippi Infantry in the Army of Northern Virginia through much of the Civil War. After returning home, he had helped defend Mobile with Captain Henry Gillum’s Mounted Rifles. After moving to Collin, Texas, he participated in the strikers’ negotiation, but—not surprisingly, given his background—he encouraged self-defense measures by the strikers. The authorities believed him to have been the prime mover at Buttermilk Junction and charged him as “an accessory before the fact to the murder of Richard Townsend.”20
Not satisfied with arresting Lovin on the charge of murdering Townsend, law enforcement rearrested him on April 10 for incitement to riot. Released on habeas corpus, Lovin had returned to the strike, determined to secure a settlement. In mid-June, he turned up in St. Louis, attempting to save the jobs of the strikers at Fort Worth. He “claimed that the men had committed no depredations, had acted peaceably during the riots and now asked that they be reinstated in their former positions.”21 With the press clearly on the side of the management, the strike movement shrank into the summer and finally collapsed in September.
What happened on the Gould railroads paralleled developments elsewhere in the country. That spring, for example, saw eight-hour strikes in Chicago that resulted in the May 1886 Haymarket Riot. The police moved to break up an otherwise peaceful rally, after which a bomb exploded. Who killed how many remains contested, but eight leaders of the local IWPA found themselves in the dock for criminal conspiracy to create the conditions that led to the death of the police officer killed by the initial blast. In the end, the strikes collapsed and the courts sentenced seven of the eight to the gallows, though eventually only four hanged, including Albert R. Parsons, a Texas-born Confederate veteran.
While uninterested in promoting anarchism, the broad workers movement in Chicago tended to rally to anarchists’ defense. Very briefly, they also coalesced around the idea of challenging the capitalist parties at the polls. A wave of new local labor parties took to the field in response to a surge of direct government prosecutions aimed not only at the Southwest railroad strike and the strike wave in Chicago, but also at musicians in New York City.
This last issue galvanized the labor movement in that city. Furious over their perceived mistreatment by the courts and the government, the movement chose to run Henry George for mayor. The author of Progress and Poverty had moved to the city only a few years before, but remained skeptical as to the value of small independent campaigns, demanding that the labor organizations secure 50,000 signatures of voter support. When these signatures were supplied, George accepted the nomination on a United Labor Party ticket.
William A. Carsey made a predictable reappearance in the movement on behalf of the Democrats. At the time he held a patronage job as an inspector in the Department of Public Works and, like many in such jobs, threw his time and energies into helping to defeat George. The Democratic candidate Abram S. Hewitt mimicked the George campaign by issuing “blanks calling for signatures to a pledge to vote for him for Mayor” and “quietly catering to the George people by having his ‘workers’ give it out that he really believes in nearly all that George teaches.” Carsey and his men also positioned themselves “to try and split up the labor vote in the interest of the Democratic Mayoralty candidate.” In particular, they issued “purely imaginary reports of the decline of the George movement.”22
The Democrats in New York employed various dirty tricks against the George movement, as the United Labor Party called itself. The Democratic organization remained far more concerned about losing the election than about the precedent such a defeat might mark. On the other hand, however impressive the numbers of the George movement seemed to be, it represented from the beginning a defensive response to the prosecution of trade unionists—a protest vote aimed at demonstrating the labor movements’ ability to push one or both of the major parties into a less overtly hostile stance.23
Often touted as a great example of a third party movement, these new efforts in the 1880s by George and the earlier antimonopolists never seemed to share the old insurgent hope of becoming a major party, as the Republicans had in the 1850s. Rather, the reformers opened the door to a kind of religious “witnessing,” shaping the modern idea of the protest vote as merely a means of “moral suasion” to influence one of the existing major parties.
The defeat of the strike movements and the failure of the electoral efforts also coincided with the final break between the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions and the Knights. The craftsmen went on to found the American Federation of Labor, securing the hegemony of the “business unionism” or “pure and simple” unionism that abandoned the old vision of an all-inclusive labor reform association.24
Escapes and Safety Valves
Sullivan, one of the articulate, militant cowboys discontented with the new order on the range, went east, passing through several Wild West shows and freely sharing his views both with John Swinton’s Paper and with Karl Marx’s daughter when she visited Cincinnati.25
Sullivan faced the crisis unfolding in the cattle industry with skills beyond those of the ordinary cowpuncher. Wagon trains, freight services, and stagecoach lines all needed scouts, as did the U.S. Cavalry. Sullivan found work as an army scout through 1881 and 1882 and won considerable fame for his talents with a rope and a six-shooter. In the sparsely populated region, an active traveler may well have met all the people Sullivan claimed to have encountered—Kit Carson, “Wild Bill” Hickok, “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and “Texas Jack” Vermillion of Wyatt Earp’s vendetta riders after Tombstone. He also mentioned Major Frank North of the Pawnee Scouts and Generals George R. Crook and George Armstrong Custer. In New Mexico, Sullivan encountered Frederick Remington who supposedly used Sullivan in a painting on which the statue of “The Cowboy” in Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park was modeled.26
“Buffalo Bill” tried to recruit Sullivan for his touring show. When Cody planned his more elaborate “Wild West Show,” Sullivan accepted the offer to become part of the first troupe. There was such a demand for the show that one of Cody’s partners, William F. Carver—“Doc” Carver—started a new company in 1884, recruiting Sullivan as his right-hand man.27 The end of the summer, though, brought legal difficulties for Carver that imploded the entire company.28
Carver’s Wild West Show collapsed and stranded Sullivan, forty Indians, a dozen horses, two antelope, a deer, and a bear in Valparaiso, followed by Carver with another dozen cowboys, a “16-piece Negro band,” and other sundry, newly unemployed entertainers. Then the creditors’ lawyers descended on the group. Broncho John and others immediately appealed to the local residents, who organized a relief committee that kept the Indians together. He also raised money to get them to Chicago, from which point the Bureau of Indian Affairs agreed to get them home. Before departing, though, they gave a performance in gratitude to the people of Valparaiso.29
Out of this came Broncho John’s old Wild West show, which generally toured in the Midwest, but its movements can be easily traced through newspapers from the period. The New York Sun interviewed Sullivan almost immediately after the show began touring—an interview likely arranged by the old radical John Swinton, long associated with the paper.30 A few years earlier, Swinton had been the guest of honor at a banquet thrown by leaders in the news industry, one of whom apparently offered a toast to the independent press. Swinton reportedly scoffed:
There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job … We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men.31
At the time of the banquet, the Sun, Swinton’s own venture into independent journalism, had already begun to collapse; shortly thereafter, Swinton walked away from his John Swinton’s Paper to try and revive it.
Around this time, Swinton also encountered Eleanor—also called Jenny or Tussy—Marx Aveling at a dime museum in Cincinnati. Her father had spent his life formulating a coherent social and economic critique of capitalism based on what he saw and studied in the Old World. Marx had always wanted a closer look at capitalism in the United States, whose politicians claimed to be taking an exceptional approach to nation-building, but never got the chance.
Eleanor, a striking woman, had become an important figure in her own right. Interested in the Irish cause by the age of twelve, she began accompanying her father to labor and socialist conferences at the age of sixteen. After losing her parents and a sister, she took on an even more public role in the movement. In 1884, she joined the dry-as-dust Social Democratic Federation and helped William Morris and others launch a new Socialist League, which looked to mass work as well as the distribution of socialist ideas. She also helped launch the Women’s Trade Union League and lay the foundations for what would erupt a few years later in the Great Dock Strike. Her longtime interest in literary, artistic, and theatrical work explains not only her association with Morris but also her interest in Wild West theatrics in the United States. She would certainly have considered what Broncho John told her and her companions as a great vindication of her father’s perspectives on class and capitalism.
Broncho John’s troupe in Cincinnati may well have included refugees of the cowboy strikes over the previous years. The shows featured a touring group of cowboys; Sullivan would give “stereotyped speeches about them” while his subjects lounged about “in their picturesque garb, and looking terribly bored.”32 In finding the press remarkably disinterested in the truth about the domination of the West by big capitalists to the detriment of the small holders and cowboys, Sullivan was hardly alone.
