1877 Pennsylvania. General Assembly. Committee Appointed to Investigate the Railroad Riots in July

“ These railroad authorities can afford salaries that will secure the costliest luxuries and sustain an apish aristocracy, that cannot extend the salary to meet the commonest necessaries of life, to the beggared, starving, crushed laborer and his family. All these magnates will talk of the impossibility of running business without further curtailing the wages of the poor laborer. Arrogant impudence! Unbearable tyranny! Why, it has come to this, that labor is servitude! That a poor man must delude himself to satisfaction at the thought of starving, and respectfully take a pittance called wages. ”

“ The wailing of women and children, the deep cursing of outraged men, and the outspoken indignation of an entire community, swell the chorus of condemnation against the officer or officers of the First regiment of Pennsylvania militia, who assumed the fearful responsibility of that hasty command to fire. We desire not to be unjust to the strangers. The strong current of public feeling should not prevent us from upholding them in their terrible deed, if the facts sustain them. ”

“ Tired, hungry, worn out, surrounded by a mob of infuriated men, yelling like demons, fire on nearly all sides of them, suffocated and blinded by smoke, with no chance to rest, and but little knowledge of what efforts were being made for their relief, with orders not to fire on the mob unless in necessary self defense, the wonder is that they were not totally demoralized ”

“ Such a town as Saltaire, with its neat cottages, pleasant parks, clean streets, fine churches and schools, where labor is respected, and intemperance banished, is a better monument than any made of marble or stone, and will perpetuate the name of its founder more surely and completely than if he had made a fortune by grinding down his human help to the last farthing, and then on his death-bed bequeathing it to some public institution. ”

“ Now that the strikers' contest has reached its crisis, and the military and civil are powerless to preserve order, and the blood of innocent men and children, shot down by Philadelphia roughs, cries aloud for atonement, it may not be amiss to place the responsibility for this awful condition of things where it belongs. The strikers have manifested, all along, an unwonted forbearance. There was no overt act of violence. ”

“ Meeting an enemy on a field of battle, you go there to kill. The more you kill, and the quicker you do it, the better; but in this instance you had a division of six hundred men—my division was six hundred men. Colonel Guthrie was at Torrens, surrounded by a mob. The balance of my troops were at Twenty-eighth street, and here you had men who had fathers and brothers and relatives mingled in the crowd of rioters, and it was very natural for them to have a feeling that to fire then and kill these men, was like shooting their own relatives. ”

“ The civil process had not been legally exhausted or properly invoked, and Sheriff Fife's misstatements and lying bulletins, and General Pearson's indiscreet bravado, only added fuel to what was already an overmastering flame. In a city where nearly every man is a worker, and where the mercantile community was bitterly hostile to an odious corporation, which had ground its life blood out by discrimination, the folly of bringing a few thousand Philadelphia troops to overawe the one hundred thousand workingmen of the city ought to have been apparent to the dullest observer. ”

“ On Monday, Pittsburgh was certainly in a very deplorable condition. I noticed that the streets—some of them—particularly Fourth avenue and Third street, were crowded almost from curb to curb with strangers—not railroad men, because I think I should have recognized, from their appearance, the class of men that work in our work-shops from this crowd. They seemed to be composed of strangers, miners, and others from the neighboring parts here, up and down the river. Of course, the most of that crowd were idlers, men who would be ready to join in almost any destruction of property. ”

“ Contrast, in all this crisis, between the mock heroics of the Pennsylvania railroad squad, with its plotting and counter-plotting, and the clear-headed attitude of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, who wisely remained passive until the storm spent itself, shows the difference between the statesmanship of Garrett and the poppy-cock of Scott. As the case stands, every one of the military should be arrested and tried for murder, and their abettors taught a lesson not likely to be soon forgotten. ”

“ I saw men coming along, carrying provisions, bacon, hams, and articles that they had taken from the cars they had broken open—carrying them away back two or three miles into the country, and I saw them walking along the streets, and it appeared to me that people were afraid to say a word to them. They were alarmed—they did not know what to make of it. It appeared to come upon them like a clap of thunder—they were unprepared for it in any way. I never saw men labor more earnestly, and labor harder to try to do their whole duty than that citizens' committee did. ”

“ At this writing the air is filled with rumors of fire and war. The troops of the State are concentrating here from all sides to the support of the Philadelphians, now cooped up, apparently terror-stricken, in the fire-threatened railroad round-house, and surrounded by an ever-increasing mass of armed citizens. It is possible that further bloodshed may be averted. The very free vent given to the excitement to-night, in arming and marching about with banners and guns may explain it, and give time for sober second thought to assert itself. ”

“ The feeling against the Philadelphia soldiery, which seemed to have acted with unseemly precipitancy, was very bitter, and threats were made that they will not be allowed to go home alive. Every law-abiding citizen must deplore extremes, but in a contest like the present, so long as labor, without violence, merely asserted its right to live, it was entitled to the sympathy of every worker in the hive of human industry, and the cowardice and imbecility of the railroad sharks, who sought to overawe all this community by imported bummers, met its proper rebuke. ”

“ It certainly was a sight that any man who had love for the military would cheer at. I never saw a handsomer sight for so small a body of men. They were in regular order, well uniformed, thoroughly equipped, and their guns looked splendidly in the sun; and the crowd gave way and there was no actual resistance—nothing to stop the troops until they tried to clear the Twenty-eighth street crossing. ”

“ When you consider that a crowd or a mob is always cowardly, so that the firing of eight or ten men into it will break it, I really believe that the best plan would have been to have picketed Penn avenue and Liberty street—to have kept these streets clear, and then if necessary, to have picketed the upper side of the railroad track, which would have formed a square of pickets, whereby to preserve the cars. ”

“ But the capitalist himself has not been blameless; instead of, in the common phrase, meeting his workmen half-way, and trying to come to a fair understanding with them, he has put himself on his dignity, and has placed all the blame of the results brought about by the demagogue upon the laborer himself. He must remember that the laborer is human, with hopes and aspirations as well as passions and prejudices, and that it is much better to cultivate the former by fair, frank, and courteous treatment, than to inflame the latter by the opposite course. ”

“ Of one thing there is no doubt, and that is, that resort to violence will not accomplish its object. Widely spread as is the sympathy with the strikers, it is a fallacy to suppose that lawful force will not be found to put down unlawful force. There never yet was a case in this country, where mob violence triumphed in the end, however apparently righteous the cause in which it was invoked, and there never will be such a case, until the American people loses its strong instinct for the preservation, at all hazards, of the established law and order. ”

“ On Friday, July 20th, the freight conductors and brakemen on the Pennsylvania railroad, at Philadelphia, began to be uneasy, and on Saturday, the 21st, a strike was in full operation among them. They gathered in crowds at the yards of the company where the freight trains were made up to start out, and they, as in other places, were joined by a large crowd of idle men, tramps, and vagabonds, such as are found around a large city, and who scent out a chance for trouble or a riot, as a crow scents carrion. ”

“ Two hours of calm, candid talk and fair treatment between the officers of the roads and the employés would have done more toward a permanent pacification than a regiment of military. Who would answer for the consequences, supposing that on the head of the hasty turn out of the military blood had been shed yesterday? The law is great and its majesty powerful when administered with cautious solemnity and decorum, but never should it be stripped of its grave and most serious surroundings. ”

“ The refusal of the mayor to go to the scene of the disturbance himself, when specially requested to do so, and to raise a special police to meet the emergency, is inexplicable on any theory of a wish on his part to do his duty and enforce the law, and when contrasted with the vigorous measures taken by the mayor of the sister city of Allegheny, and of nearly every other place in which riots occurred, must be most humiliating to the people who elected such a man as their chief magistrate. ”

“ It is impossible for us to conceive that the action of the railroad strikers, taking the worst view of either side of the case, justified the calling out of the military.
Time should have been allowed for a respectful parley between parties; time for the railroad company to properly consider the grievances complained of in the respectful petition of the strikers, and time for the railroad employés to act in response. There is tyranny in this country worse than anything ever known in Russia, and it is time we should get at the gist of it. ”

“ I went down and crossed the lower bridge, and over into the street where Mr. Layng is living. I do not think we saw fifty people. The people had gone up to the fire. Allegheny City was at that time as quiet as it is on any Sabbath day, outside of the immediate neighborhood of the depot. I met no person on Sunday who was not just as anxious as they could be to do anything and everything they could to put down the rebellion, as I called it, for as I have said, I never could recognize it as a riot or anything else than an uprising of the people. ”

“ You, gentlemen, can judge whether a city of thirty-five thousand inhabitants, the larger portion, or a larger per centage of that of the laboring element—whether a force of twenty men is any too great a force as a police and protective force. ”

“ In stopping the trains they merely "entreat" the engineers to step down and out, though of course the entreaty is equivalent to command. Everything is done decently and in order, and rumors about the burning of the round-house are baseless and apparently malevolent. All violence is discountenanced; even the communistic speeches of certain hot-heads, who have gone out to incite the men, have been coolly received, and the imputation that they are a mob in act of riot is indignantly denied. Towards the militia, the strikers preserve a dignified and manly attitude. ”

“ All peace officers (and the military when called out to suppress a riot, is only a posse for the peace officers) are expected, and it is their duty, to coöperate for the purpose of keeping the peace. An officer, willing and anxious to do his duty, will never object to do what he can to enforce the law because some other officer or officers are trying to assist in the same object, even if they do not consult him, while one who is looking for some excuse for evading his duty is very apt to find one that will satisfy himself, although it may be satisfy no one else. ”