Burbank's Reign of the Rabble
Where Kruger’s The St. Louis Commune of 1877 takes a, shall we say, “macrohistorical” approach, David Burbank’s Reign of the Rabble does quite the opposite. What I mean by this is that where Kruger is primarily interested with illustrating the lineage of the strike and the short-lived “commune” (if it was truly worthy of the name) to the famed one in Paris in 1871, Burbank is more or less content to communicate the minute details of the week of July 22nd, 1877, both in St. Louis and beyond as the strike wave, beginning on the 17th in Martinsburg on the Baltimore & Ohio rail line, rolled west across the country. Perhaps we can say the difference lies in the split between history and “labor history”. Overall, is that Reign is an excellent work of historical scholarship, exhaustive in its detail, but rather unable to explain its own relevance.
Burbank is appropriately dismissive of, if not the strikers themselves, the mediocre leadership of the Workingmen’s Party and especially its representatives in the strikers’ Executive Committee: “The St. Louis strikers had neither the talent nor the opportunity to set up a ‘Commune’, and probably did not desire to do so…[but] the remarkable fact is, that no American city has come so close to being ruled by a workers’ soviet, as we would now call it, as St. Louis, Missouri, in the year 1877”.
Reign differs greatly from Commune in providing an understanding of the conditions in which the strike arose beyond the shared story of dramatically hollowed-out wages in transit and rail, which, nominally, is what the strikes were all about (though in St. Louis it also demanded an 8 hour day and an end to child labor). The post-war boom had been utterly shattered in the Panic of 1837, widely viewed as one of the first real modern depression-contractions in the capitalist system, which was itself likely caused in no small part by dramatic overcapitalization in railroads, in which “a period of wild speculation was accompanied by a ruinous rate war” that saw many rail companies driven from the field and their holdings fall into Federal recievership, a status that would later trouble the strikers (who were loathe to disrupt Federal property save they call down the wrath of the Grand Army of the Republic). The panic became felt in St. Louis in 1874 with a round of bank suspensions; in 1876, the Whiskey Ring scandal went sky-high, while at the same time a new conviviality bloomed between northern industrial capital and southern whites as capitalist fractions circled the wagons against insurgent labor activity. However 1873 had also mostly torpedoed existing unions, save for that of the rail engineers; thus, the state of play in 1877 was not one of significant labor institutions by any means (the Knights of Labor were still, at this point, far too secretive and decentralized to have an effect on the strike). But these were not wildcats; in fact, the strikers quickly sought their own order – “at every railway center the strike touched, autonomous, local committees of the railroad workers sprang into existence...but the strike had no centralized leadership whatever.”
Another fascinating point Burbank insists upon is the need for causal separation between St. Louis and East St. Louis, the latter of which housed the Union Depot and the switching not just for St. Louis bound trains but served as the fulcrum between the eastern and western rail systems nationally. “There were,” Burbank writes, “in fact, too few railroad employees in St. Louis to cause any concern. More concern was felt about the railroad center just across the river, whose population consisted chiefly of railroad employees.” The East St. Louis strikers’ shutdown was far more militant and devastating than that across the river, but in St. Louis the strike generalized, was given some semblance of direction by the WPUSA, and further strengthened by regular, nightly meetings at Lucas Market throughout the week where speeches were made and from and to which thousands of strikers marched, playing the Marseillaise by torchlight.
Finally, against the rather romantic notes from Krueger which highlight the combined might of white and black workers striking together, Burbank both highlights the problems of racism within the WPUSA, specifically Committee member Alfred Currlin, who was fond of blaming problems of unruliness on black strikers on the levee. He also notes that the strike occurred at an opportune time historically, before continuously miserable treatment by white ‘radicals’ would effectively segregate the labor movement for the remainder of the century.
Marx, writing to Engels on Wednesday July 25th, noted the “first eruption against the oligarchy of associated capital which has arisen since the Civil War will of course be put down” and that “the policy of the new President will turn the Negroes into allies of the workers, and the large expropriations of land (especially fertile land) in favor of railway, mining, etc., companies will convert the farmers of the West, who are already very disenchanted, into allies of the workers”, all favorably developing towards the formation of a true American labor party. Of course, this did not come to pass; the Workingmen, themselves the bastard offspring of the First International after it moved to New York and then disintegrated along Lassallean and Marxist lines (before reforming), if anything, groped toward a template that still defines American labor, taking it upon themselves to assure good order (and even work continuations, such as at the Belcher Sugar Factory!) and cooperation with capital at all costs, even as all parties knew that with a simple call the strike could have almost assuredly actually left a legacy to rival that of the Communards. As it stands, they failed to act, they wept and ran and hid and capitulated to the posse comitatus and the Committee for Public Safety and the local merchants, and the strike was a distant memory within weeks, to say nothing of a century and a half on.