Nature Without Man

July 21st, 1877 was the day that Pittsburgh railroad workers launched a sympathy strike, in solidarity with unionists on the Baltimore and Ohio line who were stuck in a bloody battle with the Maryland militia. Pennsylvania's militia was just as quick to attack as their compatriots to the south, but the strikers of Pittsburgh were prepared.

The workers on the Pennsylvania Line, armed with rocks and even the support of their local police and Pittsburgh's militia men, met the troops from Philadelphia, who had been shipped in to restore order, at the train station. A volley of rocks from the strikers was met with waves of gunfire, resulting in the deaths of at least twenty men, women and children, along with thirty serious injuries. On hearing of the massacre,

Miners and steel workers came pouring in from the outskirts of the city and as night fell the immense crowd proved so menacing to the soldiers that they retreated into the roundhouse.

The strike soon spread as far west as the Michigan Central in Chicago, and the Missouri and Pacific in St. Louis, but by August, the rail companies in collusion with the government had gained the upper hand, with a show of force resulting in over one hundred deaths and one thousand injuries. 100,000 striking railroad men were effectively "shot back to work."

From the Great Strike came some of the first large-scale, national organizing of labor in the Industrial Age. The Knights of Labor, founded in Philadelphia in 1869, rose to prominence and at its peak represented over 700,000 workers around the country. Its decline was hastened in 1886 by the founding of the American Federation of Labor, and the rest is history.

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It was also July 21st of 2005 that Flip Saunders was named head coach of the Detroit Pistons. Not as important as the Great Strike, you might say. I say, that remains to be seen.


Minutemen - Nature Without Man
Dock Boggs - Oh Death