About the Author

THERESA A. CASE is an associate professor of history at the University of Houston - Downtown.

Reviews

"...a lively account...notable contention...colorful narrative...Case closely dissects the evidence to determine what went wrong."--Donald W. Rogers, Central Connecticut State University-- (10/19/2011)

"Case provides a good description of railroad workers' views of manhood, identifying differences among those engaged in the various tasks. This study of an important strike provides useful insight into state intervention in labor conflict and competing conceptions of worker masculinity during the late nineteenth century."--Stephen H. Norwood, The Journal of Southern History-- (11/28/2011)

In The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor, Theresa Case presents a lively account of the Knights of Labor's famous 1886 strike against finan- cier Jay Gould's southwestern railroads, the first major study of this event since Ruth Allen's 1942 book The Great Southwest Strike. An. associate pro-fessor of history at the University of Houston-Downtown, Case plunges dee-ply into manuscript collections, state and federal government publications, trade union journals, and regional newspapers to argue that the southwestern strike of 1886 figured centrally in the late-nineteenth-century labor move- ment's development.Case's notahlc s;ontention is that the 1886 strike emanated out of the inter- play between the southwestern railroad industry's financial fortunes and rail- road workers' class culture, not just out of a clash between the nefarious Gould and Knights of Labor leaders. The 1870s and early 1880s were good times for Gould roads like the Wabash, Missouri Pacific, and the Texas & Pacific. Thousands of "boomer" railroad men built a socio-cultural hierarchy divided between white skilled workers in the "running trades" and an array of black, Mexican, native-born white, and European immigrant laborers in yard and unskilled work. When the economy soured in 1884 and 1885 and overbuilt railroads responded by slashing wages and reducing crew sizes, free labor ideology, anti-monopoly sentiment, community sup- port, a saloon-based masculine culture, and nearly universal hostility toward Chinese and convict laborers all united the diverse railway workforce into a "massive yet orderly walkout, across lines of skill and occupation" along Gould roads and rival Union Pacific lines, producing successful strike settle- ments and numerous new Knights of Labor assemblies, including District Assembly (DA) 101 in Sedalia, Missouri (108). Case thus confirms the view of Leon Fink, Kim Voss, and others that the Knights burgeoned over the course of these strikes but adds that organizational changes in the order portended its downfall.
Case's colorful narrative claims that the culminating March 1886 walkout differed from previous grassroots job actions. It was a top-down sympathy strike called by DA 101 master workman Martin Irons and regional assem- blies to enforce previous strike agreements. Irons summoned the strike, moreover, without consulting the Knights national leadership under Terence Powderly. Unfortunately, strikers got only spotty community sup- port this time, and they lacked cooperation from skilled engineers and fire- men. More ominously, railroad middle managers refused to arbitrate and secured federal court injunctions against strikers on solvent and insolvent roads alike, a prelude to the 1894 Pullman Strike. DA 101 leader Irons then gambled by widening the walkout, but violence erupted and the strike soon collapsed.
Case closely dissects the evidence to determine what went wrong. Contemporary congressional testimony, an some tstorians, am e allegedly "pernicious" Irons for egging the protest into violence, but Case finds him to have heen a cautious leader who made misguided and desperate decisions when forces moved heyond his control (185). Case also denies that racial divisions undermined the strike. Like Leon Fink, she concedes that white Knights embraced the white supremacist Redemption-era racial hierar- chy rather than egalitarian "interracial" relations, but she contends that they did promote separate "biracial" black assemblies to achieve worker unity across skill lines, a strategy that met considerable success (136).3 Her characterization of this policy as a defiance of "Jim Crow," however, confuses the fluid racial atmosphere of the post-Reconstruction era with the rigid seg- regation of the post-1890 period.Case concludes that the Great Southwest Strike illuminates the critical turn- ing point in American history marked hy the 1886 Great Upheaval of labor. The strike, she contends, exemplified efforts by leaders like Martin Irons to establish institutional methods for countering "mass industry" with "the power of mass action" (226}. She joins historians like William Forhath and Melvyn Dubofsky, however, by arguing that legal and governmental force stymied this possibility.4 She argues that although workers were less united in 1886 than in 1885, it was the federal court in junctions that drove the decisive wedge between sllilled and unskilled railroad workers. Court action also forced railroad men to accept the narrow entrepreneurial concept of "freedom of contract" rather than the broad old producer vision of free labor, thereby eviscerating the rationale for mass action. Case's evi- dence also powerfully reveals that tha labor movement lacked the resources and internal cohesion needed to confront concentrated capital and state power in 1886, a vulnerability simultaneously exposed by the movement's disintegration following the eight-hour protest and the Haymarket incident.
Many historians see broad-based labor activism in decline after the 1880s and 1890s, but John Enyeart, an associate professor at Bucknell University, contends in The Quest /or 1ust and Pure Law" that it remained vibrantly alive in the Rocky Mountain states of Colorado, Montana, and Utah. Thoroughly researched in regional newspapers, archives, labor puhli- cations, and worker memoirs, and thoughtfully engaged with recent labor Rocky Mountain workers embraced women as "key players in organizing drives and other fights for working-class rights:, though he does not system- atically explore discrimination against female workers (246). Quest thus suggests that, despite their prejudices, Rocky Mountain workers' social demo cratic culture unified them more than workers elsewhere. It leaves unex- plored, however, how much the region's relatively large preponderance of Native-horn American and western European laborers contributed to this over black and Eastern European workers.
Enyeart dates political unionism's decline to the mid-1910s, rather than to World War l's aftermath, and in fact minimizes the war's impact. Following the 1914 Ludlow massacre, he argues, employers led by John D. Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron Company escalated their attack on Rocky Mountain workers' social democratic political culture by advancing welfare capitalism and arbitration procedures, while obstructing union organizing drives and labor legislation. By the 1920s, employer resistance and ethno-racial divisions incited by the Ku Klux Klan undercut Rocky Mountain workers' political unity, though activists "did not give up the battle." (239) Encouraged by pro-labor politicians including Montana Democrat Burton K Wheeler, they continued a -constant battle for justice,"-guardling] pro-labor policies on the books" and sustaining a broad view of labor activism that would reemerge in the 1930s (219, 238).
All three books confirm that American workers experienced the ideological shift from free-labor producer values to standard-of-living consumer values from 1870 to 1920 but imply that the social and institutional context for this change varied from region to region. The potential for mass mobiliz- ation differed: It was largely absent in Schmidt's South, defeated by courts and railroad managers in Case's Southwest, but somewhat successful in Enyeart's Rocky Mountain West. Likewise, the forum for labor activism var- ied from southern courts to southwestern streets and railroad yards to Rocky Mountain political institutions. Finally, laborers showed diHerent capacities for unity in the South's relatively homogenous working class, the Southwest's occupationally divided workforce, and the Rocky Mountain's social demo- cratic environment. Workers, it seems, moved not as a monolith when they adjusted to modern industrialism but acted in separate regional working class cultures. -- (10/01/2011)

"Along with the greater story of the causes and outcome of the railroad strike, the value of this book is enhanced by many interesting details about railroaders' race relations, job duties, attitudes toward work, and so forth."--Kemp Dixon, The Journal of South Texas
-- (06/20/2013)

"In the first major re-evaluation in fifty years of one of the most pivotal conflicts in American industrial history, Case offers a refreshing blend of thick description and convincing argument. Drawing on a rich archival base, she surrounds powerful characters like Jay Gould, Terence Powderly, and Martin Irons with a lesser-known but equally absorbing set of local actors and is particularly adept at drawing our attention to ambivalent themes of racial cooperation and Chinese exclusion woven into the strike's extended narrative."--Leon Fink, distinguished professor, history department, University of Illinois at Chicago

"Theresa Case does more than revisit the long-neglected 1886 Southwest Railroad strike, a crucial component of that year's "Great Upheaval" of labor. That, in itself, would represent a substantial contribution. But she goes much further to recreate the worlds of white and African-American railroad workers in the late 19th century, exploring with sensitivity the bonds of community, occupational hierarchies, the centrality of free labor ideology, biracial unionism, and race relations. The result is a sophisticated study that deepens our understanding of the Knights of Labor and race relations in the Gilded Age."--Eric Arnesen, professor of history, George Washington University, and author of Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers & the Struggle for Equality--Eric Arnesen "author of Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers & the Struggle for Equal "

"Theresa A. Case not only offers the most compelling explanation to date of the strikes' stunning success in 1885 and their spectacular failure in 1886, but she also uses the strikes as vehicles to consider matters of race and class, manhood and citizenship, labor and the law, and region. . . Meticulously researched and richly narrated, The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor restores to their rightful place the protests of southwestern railroad workers and their communities as key events of the 1880s and demonstrates the importance of the Southwest for industrialization and the conflicts it generated there." -;/DIV>--Paul Michel Taillon "The Journal of American History "