Great Railroad Strike DBQ Essay

On the July of 1877, thousands of railroad laborers went on strike. The rest of America watched in shock. The Great Railroad Strike was one of the first of its nature, a complete halt in railroad traffic and seizure of railroads—across the entire country. The strikers would even destroy buildings, train cars, and other rail property, and in the wake of their destruction, other laborers and sympathizers still gathered in protest for the same workingman’s cause. Allan Pinkerton would condemn the strikers, stating that they had “unlocked the floodgates of anarchy and riot.” They were certainly violent. But they had also organized in less than a month—almost spontaneously—revealing that there were serious, commonly shared concerns toward industrial

Especially as cities became increasingly crowded, living conditions worsened, and those who earned too little lived the slums. In addition, workers on average could expect to be unemployed and unpaid for at least one month each year. One coal miner in Illinois had only been able to work thirty weeks in a year. A family just as poor was recorded to have lived in “a very dirty and unhealthy place, everything perfectly filthy.” In addition, the “children [did] not attend school. They are ignorant of the full sense of the word. Father could not write his name.” These families could not escape destitution, no matter how hard they worked. The fruitless efforts of laborers and their terrible living conditions were strong justifications to the labor movement in the late nineteenth century. They were also the reasons that the Knights of Labor would eventually accrue over 800,000 members, and almost half a million workers would be on strike by 1886. In attempts to fix the labor system, the Knights would advocate policies for shorter, eight-hour work days and the prohibition of child labour—ultimately, they wanted to reward an employee industrial labour and utility—rather than his or her prior status of