Description
For this assignment you will need to:Provide a summary of each reading:These summaries can be short, between 2-3 sentences for each text, but they should be substantive. Each summary must correctly identify the main argument, and demonstrate comprehension of the text.Provide analysis of one of the readings:Analysis is an original insight or idea about a text. It must be unique, in that analysis is not simply repeating what the text already says, but providing a new idea or question about what is presented.Don’t worry if you struggle with this initially as we will workshop these skills more. And when in doubt, simply ask a question of the text and try to answer it as best you can.Please do not use any form of AI like chatgpt
Unformatted Attachment Preview
The Great Strike of 1877
Evidence 18: Speech of Peter H. Clark, 22 July 1877
Introduction
Peter H. Clark, principal of the Colored High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, and member of
the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, was one of the first black socialists in
America. On July 22, 1877, he delivered a speech at a Workingmen’s Party-sponsored
rally in downtown Cincinnati. An extract from the speech, which was heard by
thousands of assembled workers, appears below.
Document
. . .I sympathize in this struggle with the strikers, and I feel sure that in this I have the
cooperation of nine tenths of my fellow citizens. The poor man’s lot is at best a hard
one. His hand-to-hand struggle with the wolf of poverty leaves him no leisure for any
of the amenities of life, his utmost rewards are a scanty supply of food, scanty
clothing, scanty shelter, and if perchance he escapes a pauper’s grave [he] is
fortunate. Such a man deserves the aid and sympathy of all good people, especially
when, in the struggle for life, he is pitted against a powerful organization such as the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad or the Pennsylvania Central.
. . .The too-ready consent of the state and national governments to lend themselves
to the demand of these wealthy corporations cannot be too severely condemned.
Has it come to this, that the President of a private corporation can, by the click of a
telegraphic instrument, bring state and national troops into the field to shoot down
American citizens guilty of no act of violence? For you observe that neither at
Grafton, Baltimore or
Pittsburgh was there violence offered to persons or property until the troops were
deployed upon the scene. At Grafton it is noticeable that women, wives and mothers,
were the chief forces employed by the strikers to keep others from taking their places.
. . .The condition of poverty is not a favorable one either for the individual or for the
nation. Especially it is an unfavorable condition for a nation whose government lies in
the hands of all its citizens. A monarchy or an aristocracy can afford to have the mass
of its citizens steeped in poverty and ignorance. Not so in a republic. Here every man
should be the owner of wealth enough to render him independent of the threats or
bribes of the demagogue. He should be the owner of wealth enough to give him
leisure for the study which will qualify him to study and understand the deep questions
of public policy which are continually demanding solution. The more men there are
who have this independence, this leisure, the safer we are as a nation; reduce the
number, and the fewer there are, the more dangerous the situation. So alarming has
been the spread of ignorance and poverty in the past generation, that whole cities in
our land•whole states, indeed•are at the mercy of an ignorant rabble who have no
political principle except to vote for the men who pay the most on elections days and
who promise to make the biggest dividend of public stealing. This is sadly true, nor is
the Negro, scarcely ten years from slavery, the chief sinner in this respect.
That this evil of poverty is partially curable, at least, I am justified in thinking, because I
find each of the great political parties offering remedies for the hard times and the
consequent poverty. Many wise men, learned in political economy, assure us that their
doctrines, faithfully followed, will result in a greater production of wealth and a more
equal division of the same. But as I have said before, there is but one efficacious
remedy proposed, and that is found in Socialism.
The present industrial organization of society has been faithfully tried and has proven
a failure. We get rid of a king, we get rid of the aristocracy, but the capitalist comes in
their place, and in the industrial organization and guidance of society his little finger is
heavier than their loins. Whatever Socialism may bring about, it can present nothing
more anarchical than is found in Grafton, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. . . .
Future accumulations of capital should be held sacredly for the benefit of the whole
community. Past accumulations may be permitted to remain in private hands until,
from their very usefulness, they will become a burden which their owners will gladly
surrender.
. . .Every railroad in the land should be owned or controlled by the government. The
title of private owners should be extinguished, and the ownership vested in the
people. All a road will need to meet will be a running expense and enough to replace
waste. The people can then enjoy the benefit of travel, and where one man travels
now, a thousand can travel then. There will be no strikes, for the men who operate
the road will be the recipient of its profits.
Finally, we want governmental organization of labor so that ruinous competition and
ruinous overproduction shall equally be avoided, and those panics which sweep over
and engulf the world will forever be prevented.
. . .Let us, finally, not forget that we are American citizens, that the right of free speech
and of free press is enjoyed by us. We are exercising today the right of to assemble
and complain of our grievances. The courts of the land are open to us, and we hold in
our hands the all-compelling ballot.
There is no need for violent counsels or violent deeds. If we are patient and wise, the
future is ours.
Source:
Philip S. Foner, ed., The Voice of Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes
in the United States, 1797-1971 (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1972), 451-457.
Display Content Printable Version
1 of 3
https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook_print.cfm?smtid=3&p…
Digital History
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877
Digital History ID 1097
Date:1877
Annotation: The total miles of railroad track in the United States increased from just 23 in 1830 to
35,000 by the end of the Civil War to a peak of 254,000 in 1916. By the eve of World War I,
railroads employed one out of every 25 American workers. The industry’s growth was accompanied
by bitter labor disputes. Many of the nation’s most famous strikes involved the railroads. The Great
Railroad Strike of 1877 was the country’s first major rail strike and witnessed the first general strikes
in the nation’s history. The strikes and the violence it spawned briefly paralyzed the country’s
commerce and led governors in ten states to mobilize 60,000 militia members to reopen rail traffic.
The strike would be broken within a few weeks, but it also helped set the stage for later violence in
the 1880s and 1890s, including the Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago in 1886, the Homestead
Steel Strike near Pittsburgh in 1892, and the Pullman Strike in 1894 usher in the world’s first Labor
Day parade in 1882. In 1877, northern railroads, still suffering from the financial Panic of 1873,
began cutting salaries and wages, prompting strikes and labor violence with lasting consequences.
The Pennsylvania Railroad, the nation’s largest, cut wages by 10 percent and then, in June, by
another 10 percent. Other railroads followed suit. On July 13, the Baltimore & Ohio line cut the
wages of all employees making more than a dollar a day by 10 percent. It also slashed the work
week to just to or two or three days. Forty disgruntled locomotive firemen walked off the job. By the
end of the day, workers blockaded freight trains near Baltimore and in West Virginia, allowing only
passenter traffic to get through. Also in July, the Pennsylvania Railroad announced that it would
double the length of all eastbound trains from Pittsburgh with no increase in the size of their crews.
Railroad employeees responded by seizing control of the railyard switches, blocking the movement of
trains. Soon, violent strikes broke out in Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and
San Francisco. Governors in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia called out their state militias.
In Baltimore, a 20-year-old volunteer described the scene: “We met a mob, which blocked the
streets, wrote Charles A. Malloy. “They came armed with stones and as soon as we came within
reach they began to throw at us.” Fully armed and with bayonets fixed, the militia fired, killing 10,
including a newsboy and a 16-year-old student. The shootings sparked a rampage. protesters
burned a switchtown, a passenger car, and sent a locomotive crashing into a siding full of freight
cars. They also cut fire hoses. At the height of the melee in 14,000 rioters took to the streets.
Maryland’s governor telegraphed President Rutherford Hayes and asked for troops to protect
Baltimore. “The strike,” an anonymous Baltimore merchant wrote, “is not a revolution of fanatics
willing to fight for an idea. It is a revolt of working men against low prices of labor, which have not
been accomplished with corresponding low prices of food, clothing and house rent.” In Pittsburgh,
where the local militia sympathized with the rail workers, the governor called in National Guard
troops from Philadelphia. The troops fired into a crowd, killing more than 20 civilians, including
women and at least three children. A newspaper headline read:
“Shot in Cold Blood by the Roughs of Philadelphia. The Lexington of the Labor Conflict at Hand. The
Slaughter of Innocents.” An angry crowd forced the Philadelphia troops to retreat to a roundhouse in
the railroad complex, and set engines, buildings, and equipment ablaze. Fires raced through parts of
the city, destroying 39 buildings, 104 engines, 46 passenger cars, and over 1,200 freight cars. The
Pennsylvania Railroad claimed losses of more than $4 million in Pittsburgh. Whe the National Guard
was at last able to evacuate the roundhouse, it was harrassed by strikers and rioters. A legislative
report said that the National Guard forces “were fired at from second floor windows, from the
corners of the streets…they were also fired at from a police station, where eight or ten policemen
were in uniform.” Militia and federal troops opened the railroad in Pittsburgh and Reading, Pa. was
1/11/2024, 5:31 PM
Display Content Printable Version
2 of 3
https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook_print.cfm?smtid=3&p…
occupied by U.S. Army troops. It appears that some 40 people were killed in the violence in
Pittsburgh. Across the country more than a hundred died, including eleven in Baltimore and a dozen
in Reading, Pa. By the end of July, most strike activity was over. But labor strikes in the rail yards
recurred from 1884 to 1886 and from 1888 to 1889 and again in 1894. Native-born Americans
tended to blame the labor violence on foreign agitators. “It was evident,” said the Annals of the
Great Strikes in the United States, published in 1877, “that there were agencies at work outside the
workingmen’s strike. The people engaged in these riots were not railroad strikers. The
Internaitonalists had something to do with creating scenes of bloodshed…. The scenes…in the city
of Baltimore were not unlike those which characterized the events in the city of Paris during the
regin of the Commune in 1870.”
Document: IT is surprising that intelligent American citizens, as so many of the chief railroad
employees are, should have yielded to the sophistry that attempted to justify the recent action of
the strikers. No reasonable man will admit any essential and necessary hostility between capital and
labor, and the orators and writers who insist upon it are merely preaching barbarism. Skill and talent
produce more and earn more than dullness and ignorance; and to demand that idleness and
stupidity shall be paid equally with intelligence and industry, is to require that common-sense shall
be disregarded and civilization stop. Capital and labor are not essentially hostile, but they are
mutually dependent. The problem always is, not how to subject one arbitrarily to the other, bat how
to combine both fairly. They both assume the fact of property, but the strike denied it. Of course
mere striking for higher wages does not deny it, but preventing others from working upon their own
terms does deny it. If the intelligent railroad hand who reads this will think of it for a moment he will
see this plainly. When the men on the Baltimore and Ohio road, for instance, resolved that the road
should not be used for the transport of freight, they were committing highway robbery on the largest
scale. They were stealing as truly as if they had taken to picking pockets and robbing banks, for they
took possession of the property of the corporation and of the merchants who forwarded the freight.
They declared that the property of the corporation should be managed as they (the strikers) chose,
or not at all, and that the freight should not be directed by its owners, but by them. In the truest
sense, their movement was an effort to steal a railroad and to confiscate the freight.
What was the plea urged by the railroad strikers for their conduct? It was that the railroad
companies had wronged them by lowering wages or failing to pay arrears. But even if this were true,
the owners of the freight, and all the laboring interests that depended upon its sure-and-speedy
transport, had not wronged the strikers in any way whatever, and yet they were made to suffer. For
this no railroad man can offer any tolerable excuse. If he can not punish the man whom he believes
to have wronged him, without shooting into a crowd of innocent people, he must seek redress in
some other way. But even if the strikers felt themselves wronged, do they think that civilized society
can continue to exist if those who believe themselves to be injured are to retaliate as they choose?
What is the difference between civilization and barbarism, between America and Central Africa, but
law, and the redress of grievances not by individual force, but by prescribed legal methods? If a
railroad workman may justly seize the property of the company which, in his judgment, pays him
too little wages, then another man may justly steal bread from the baker whose loaves he considers
too small; or to, bring it home, if a railroad engineer or fireman or freight hand may rightfully take
the property of the company, which is the road and the rolling stock and the use of both, then the
company may rightfully take the property of each of those employees, that is, their labor. But what
is all this but anarchy, the right of the strongest, the dissolution of civilized society?
The further plea was that the companies would pay only starvation wages. Very well; nobody
disputes that the men were the judges of that. They were not bound to take wages on which they
could not live. But if they were rightfully the judges of that fact for themselves, what business had
they to interfere with the equal right of others to judge for themselves? Other men had precisely the
same right to say that the strikers should live on these wages that the strikers had to say that other
men should not. When the strikers insisted that others who were willing to work should not work,
they were guilty of the same greedy tyranny which they charged upon the railroad companies. If
every striker, singly or together, had the right to make his own bargains, so has every other man in
the country. If the strikers reply that all working-men ought to make common cause, and, if they will
not, that they ought to be forced to do so, they use the argument of every despot and tyrant in the
world, and make every honest and intelligent American their relentless enemy. One of the panders
to the strike said that the strikers were merely striking back. Doubtless there are intelligent men
1/11/2024, 5:31 PM
Display Content Printable Version
3 of 3
https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook_print.cfm?smtid=3&p…
among the strikers who thought that this was true. But what does it mean? Simply this, that if a
farmer, when times are hard, says to his men that he can pay them only twenty-five dollars a mouth
instead of thirty-five or forty, and thereupon the men refuse to work, and seize his tools and teams
and prevent other on from working for him, they are merely “striking back.” Pimps and panders are
never friends to those whom they profess to serve, and the man who says this to the farmer’s men
would be the first to betray them. Some of the strikers offered to enroll themselves among the
special police to keep order, and made a merit of permitting the mails to pass. But they must see
that they had the same right to stop the mails that they had to stop freight, and that they are
responsible for the terrible massacres and losses that followed their action. Whether the more
intelligent men among them thought of it or not, they have now seen, with all the world, that when
they attempt forcibly to coerce other workmen to follow them, they invoke anarchy to settle a
question of wages; and while they have their senses they know that the fate of such a movement
among the dominant race upon this continent is absolutely sure. The moral of these tremendous
events—for they are nothing less—will not be lost upon either side. The country has learned the
necessity of a thorough and efficient local armed organization. The strikers have learned the
hopeless folly of struggling against the unconquerable instinct of a race. Neither we nor any
reasonable journal deny that there may be wrongs that should be righted. That is a matter for
investigation and not for assumption; and for the consideration of all alleged wrongs we urge the
promptest, fullest, and fairest inquiry. But whatever wrongs there may be are to be remedied, and
remedied only, under and not over the law, which in this country is the will of the people.
Copyright 2016 Digital History
1/11/2024, 5:31 PM
Module 05: Industrialization and Its Discontents: The Great Strike of 1877
Evidence 17: Speech of Albert Parsons, 23 July 1877
Introduction
In the search for causes of the Great Strike of 1877, many commentators blamed the
Workingmen’s Party of the United States, a socialist, pro-labor party that had first
organized a year earlier. The Workingmen’s Party, which initially numbered no more
than 3,000 members, certainly played a role in encouraging strikers in several western
cities, but historians agree that it had no prior knowledge of the strike and little
influence on the events in most locations. Two prominent exceptions were Chicago and
St. Louis, where Workingmen’s Party officials helped transform the railroad strike into a
general strike that paralyzed both cities.
In Chicago, the Workingmen’s Party organized several large rallies to publicize its
platform and cheer on striking workers. One of the speakers was the printer and
radical labor leader Albert Parsons, who had moved to Chicago from his home in the
South. As the speech here reveals, Parsons was an eloquent public speaker who
promoted worker solidarity.
Document
We are assembled here as the grand army of starvation. Fellow-workers, let us
recollect that in this great republic that has been handed down to us by our forefathers
from 1776, that while we have the republic we have hope. A mighty spirit is animating
the hearts of the American people to-day. The American people are bowed down with
shame and hunger. When I say the American people, I mean the backbone of the
country•the men who till the soil, who guide the machine, who weave the material and
cover the backs of civilized men. We are a portion of that people. Our brothers in the
State
of Pennsylvania, in New Jersey, in the States of Maryland, New York, and Illinois, have
demanded of those who have possession of the means of production•our brothers
have made demand that they may be permitted to live, and that those men do not
appropriate the life to themselves, and that they be not allowed to turn us upon the
earth as vagrants and tramps. While we are sad indeed at our distressed and suffering
brothers in the States mentioned, that they had to resort such extreme measures,
fellow workers, we recognize the fact that they were driven to do what they have
done.
We are assembled here to-night to consider our condition. We have come together
this evening, if it is possible, to find means by which the great gloom that now
hangs over our republic can be lifted, and once more the rays of happiness can be
shed on the face of this broad land. . . .
There never can come good times in this country until the idle men have employment.
What are we going to do with the idle men? Are we to take them and shoot them?
Are we to let them drop dead? . . .Fellow workers, there is a way to get over this by
peaceful means. Say, for instance, there is work for a hundred men. There are two
hundred men to do it. If the one hundred men work for fourteen hours a day, let us
reduce the hours to seven, and that will give work to the two hundred. Let us reduce
the hours or work to one-half and then form a combination, and then demand the
wages we want. In order to do this we have to combine in some kind of a labor
organization. And if we can form a combination we can get as much for six hours
work as we formerly got for twelve. We have got to make a law on the subject of
hours. Every boss and capitalist and monopolist and railway king and every man who
is interested in labor will be opposed to us in this movement. And also the idle rich,
who live upon our strength.
Let us understand our position. If we reduce our hours of labor, the bosses and
capitalists will immediately purchase another machine to replace us. Let us, then,
immediately reduce the hours of labor once more, and in that way we can keep pace
with them. Let us remember that we can make it possible for the wealth-producing
classes to enjoy civilization by reducing the hours. It will them become possible for the
working classes to learn something of poetry and pictures, but a man who works for
fourteen hours can never be anything else than a downcast, ignorant man. If we
become
organized we can carry on the struggle successfully. . . .
Let us fight for our wives and children, for us it is a question of bread and meat. Let
the grand army of labor say who shall fill the legislative halls of this country. Now if we
do this we can go to work and unite as one people; can go to the ballot-box, and say
that the government of the United States shall be the posses[s]ors of all the rail-way
lines in the country. If the people go to work and take possession of the railroads and
telegraphs we extract the sting from the mouths of Jay Gould and Tom Scott, and they
can no longer sting us to death. We take out of their hands the means by which they
now enslave us. Let us not forget the fact that all wealth and civilization comes from
labor, and labor alone. Let us not forget that while we work ten hours a day the
capitalist puts the value of seven hours of it in his pocket. It rests with you to say
whether we shall allow the capitalists to go on, or whether we shall organize ourselves.
Will you organize? Well, then enroll your names in the grand army of of labor, and if
the capitalist engages in warfare against our rights, then we shall resist him with all
the means that God has given us.
Source:
“Illinois: The Voice of Labor,” Labor Standard 3, no. 14 (11 August 1877), 2.
William Graham Sumner on Social Darwinism (ca.1880s)
William Graham Sumner, a sociologist at Yale University, penned several pieces
associated with the philosophy of Social Darwinism. In the following, Sumner
explains his vision of nature and liberty in a just society.
The struggle for existence is aimed against nature. It is from her niggardly hand that
we have to wrest the satisfaction for our needs, but our fellow-men are our
competitors for the meager supply. Competition, therefore, is a law of nature. Nature
is entirely neutral; she submits to him who most energetically and resolutely assails
her. She grants her rewards to the fittest, therefore, without regard to other
considerations of any kind. If, then, there be liberty, men get from her just in
proportion to their works, and their having and enjoying are just in proportion to their
being and their doing. Such is the system of nature. If we do not like it, and if we try
to amend it, there is only one way in which we can do it. We can take from the better
and give to the worse. We can deflect the penalties of those who have done ill and
throw them on those who have done better. We can take the rewards from those who
have done better and give them to those who have done worse. We shall thus lessen
the inequalities. We shall favor the survival of the unfittest, and we shall accomplish
this by destroying liberty. Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this
alternative; liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of
the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the
latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.
For three hundred years now men have been trying to understand and realize liberty.
… What we mean by liberty is civil liberty, or liberty under law; and this means the
guarantees of law that a man shall not be interfered with while using his own powers
for his own welfare. It is, therefore, a civil and political status; and that nation has the
freest institutions in which the guarantees of peace for the laborer and security for the
capitalist are the highest. Liberty, therefore, does not by any means do away with the
struggle for existence. We might as well try to do away with the need of eating, for
that would, in effect, be the same thing. What civil liberty does is to turn the
competition of man with man from violence and brute force into an industrial
competition under which men vie with one another for the acquisition of material
goods by industry, energy, skill, frugality, prudence, temperance, and other industrial
virtues. Under this changed order of things the inequalities are not done away
with. Nature still grants her rewards of having and enjoying, according to our being
and doing, but it is now the man of the highest training and not the man of the
heaviest fist who gains the highest reward. It is impossible that the man with capital
and the man without capital should be equal. To affirm that they are equal would be to
say that a man who has no tool can get as much food out of the ground as the man
who has a spade or a plough; or that the man who has no weapon can defend himself
as well against hostile beasts or hostile men as the man who has a weapon. If that
were so, none of us would work any more. We work and deny ourselves to get capital
just because, other things being equal, the man who has it is superior, for attaining all
the ends of life, to the man who has it not. Considering the eagerness with which we
all seek capital and the estimate we put upon it, either in cherishing it if we have it, or
envying others who have it while we have it not, it is very strange what platitudes pass
current about it in our society so soon as we begin to generalize about it. If our young
people really believed some of the teachings they hear, it would not be amiss to
preach them a sermon once in a while to reassure them, setting forth that it is not
wicked to be rich, nay even, that it is not wicked to be richer than your neighbor.
It follows from what we have observed that it is the utmost folly to denounce capital.
To do so is to under- mine civilization, for capital is the first requisite of every social
gain, educational, ecclesiastical, political, aesthetic, or other.
Source: William Graham Sumner, The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, edited
by Albert Galloway Keller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914).
The Great Strike of 1877
Evidence 5: Allan Pinkerton, “Mendicant Tramps,” 1878
Introduction
As more unemployed workers took to the roads in search of jobs, middle- and
upper-class Americans grew increasingly concerned about the “tramp menace.”
Hundreds of thousands of wandering job seekers slept wherever they could find
temporary shelter • in boxcars, on park benches, under bridge abutments, in barns •
and survived by begging, finding piecemeal work, and engaging in petty theft. While
roaming the countryside had once been a respectable, even honorable practice, many
citizens grew less tolerant and more fearful as the number of so-called tramps
increased in the wake of the depression. The word itself does not seem to have come
into common usage until the 1870s, when it appeared as a disparaging description of
those seemingly rootless individuals rendered homeless by the depression.
The document below comes from the hand of Allen Pinkerton, the founder of a
national detective agency widely known for thwarting labor organization and
breaking strikes. Just before the Great Strike of 1877, Pinkerton’s agency helped
destroy the Molly Maguires, an organization of Irish-American coal miners in eastern
Pennsylvania that resorted to intimidation, violence, and murder when their legal
efforts to better their conditions of work and life were rebuffed. Pinkerton was also a
vocal critic of the Great Strike of 1877.
Document
While it is undoubtedly true. . .that the “tramp nuisance”. . .is of no recent
origin, I cannot agree. . .that our hard times have had no appreciable effect in
increasing tramps; for I am certain, from personal observation and inquiry, that they
have had nearly all to do in causing the country to be so filled with tramps as it is at
the present time. The brotherhood of the road in some form has always existed, and
years ago it appeared in America. But the great masses of our people were ignorant of
the tramp or the tramp’s character. The hard times which we have experienced have
been universal. They have not only depressed our own industries that thousands of
mechanics, clerks, and laboring men have been thrown out of employment here, but
the same has been true of all European countries. America is the objective point for all
classes who have been driven to the wall by poverty in every other part of the world,
and thousands upon thousands have come to us without means of subsistence and
without any possibility of securing a livelihood. What other recourse have these people
had save to turn tramp, and beg and pilfer to sustain life? It is a pitiable condition of
things, but there is not doubt that the majority of those now upon the road are there
from necessity, and not from choice. If thousands are here from abroad who have been
compelled to turn tramp, how many of our own people have been forced into the same
kind of life as the only way left to live outside of the poor-house?
. . .[E]ver since the war, circumstances and conditions have been continually arising to
transform respectable people into tramps. To bring this more forcibly to the mind of
the reader, I would suggest that this book be closed for a moment, and that the reader
then tax his own recollection for instances where men or women within his
acquaintance, at one time enjoying a good position of good social standing, have, by
some fault of their own, perhaps, but still oftener through ill-fortune, been bereft of
their means of support, and, as a consequent, their friends, and in due time became
wanderers and vagrants of the road. They may have lingered in the city for a time, but
by and by every old friend’s face is averted, every acquaintance’s back is turned, and
with a bitter heart and a discouraging, hopeless prospect beyond, they plunge into the
country because they are compelled to, and, in nine cases out of ten, are from that
moment tramps. I venture to say that nearly every one who will thus reflect upon the
subject can recall several instances of this kind, and on further reflection it will be
remembered that they have chiefly occurred since the war.
The Great Strike of 1877
Evidence 18: Speech of Peter H. Clark, 22 July 1877
Introduction
Peter H. Clark, principal of the Colored High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, and member of
the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, was one of the first black socialists in
America. On July 22, 1877, he delivered a speech at a Workingmen’s Party-sponsored
rally in downtown Cincinnati. An extract from the speech, which was heard by
thousands of assembled workers, appears below.
Document
. . .I sympathize in this struggle with the strikers, and I feel sure that in this I have the
cooperation of nine tenths of my fellow citizens. The poor man’s lot is at best a hard
one. His hand-to-hand struggle with the wolf of poverty leaves him no leisure for any
of the amenities of life, his utmost rewards are a scanty supply of food, scanty
clothing, scanty shelter, and if perchance he escapes a pauper’s grave [he] is
fortunate. Such a man deserves the aid and sympathy of all good people, especially
when,
