In 1877, twenty Irish coal miners hanged
for a terrorist conspiracy that never occurred.
BLURB
Anywhere But Schuylkill is the story of one who escaped, Mike Doyle, a teenager trying to find a new home before his alcoholic uncle kills one of his siblings. He takes a job with a union leader, who is also a gangster, while secretly courting his daughter, and quickly learns that the gang leader, cops and rival gang all want him dead.
BOOK INFORMATION
Title: Anywhere but Schuykill
Series: The Great Upheaval Trilogy, Book One
Author: Michael Dunn
Publisher: Historium Press, September, 2023
ASIN: B0CJVW1BP2
Print length: 393 pages
Genres: Historical Fiction, U.S. Historical Fiction, 19th Century
BUY LINKS
Universal Buy Link:
https://books2read.com/u/496Ag0
Historium Press
https://www.thehistoricalfictioncompany.com/it/michael-dunn
Author Bio:
Michael Dunn writes Working-Class Fiction from the Not So Gilded Age. Anywhere But Schuylkill is the first in his Great Upheaval trilogy. A lifelong union activist, he has always been drawn to stories of the past, particularly those of regular working people, struggling to make a better life for themselves and their families.
Author Links:
Website: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MikeDunnAuthor
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Michael.Dunn.Fiction
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Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Michael-Dunn/author/B0CJXGQYZ8
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/45063197.Michael_Dunn
ABOUT THE GREAT UPHEAVAL
“There was a time in the history of France when the poor found themselves oppressed to such an extent that forbearance ceased to be a virtue, and hundreds of heads tumbled into the basket. That time may have arrived with us.”
A cooper said this to a crowd of 10,000 workers in St. Louis, Missouri in July, 1877. He was referring to the Paris Commune, which happened just six years prior. Like the Parisian workers, the Saint Louis strikers openly called for the use of arms, not only to defend themselves against the violence of the militias and police who were sent to crush their strike, but for outright revolutionary aims:
“All you have to do is to unite on one idea—that workingmen shall rule this country. What man makes, belongs to him, and the workingmen made this country.”
The Economic Roots of the Great Upheaval of 1877
The Great Upheaval was the first major worker uprising in the United States. It began in the fourth year of the Long Depression which, in many ways, was worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It lasted twenty-three years and included four separate financial panics. In 1873, over 5,000 business failed. Ove one million Americans lost their jobs. In the following two years, another 13,000 businesses failed. Railroad workers’ wages dropped 40-50%. And one thousand infants were dying each week in New York City.
The Long Depression followed a period of rapid wealth accumulation by a few large capitalists, particularly railroad owners. Congress granted them huge swaths of land in 1862. The following year, they passed the National Banking Act, greatly increasing the wealth and power of financial capitalists. In 1864, they placed a 47% tariff on foreign goods, further increasing the wealth of domestic capitalists. They also passed legislation making it easier to import foreign laborers, leading to the largest immigration wave in U.S. history. The lack of regulation and oversight produced large scale greed and corruption. In 1873, Jay Cooke and Company, the largest bank in the U.S., went bankrupt. Cooke’s failure led to a 10-day closure of the New York Stock exchange.
The Great Upheaval Begins
By 1877, workers had suffered four years of wage cuts and layoffs. In July, the B&O Railroad slashed wages by 10%, their second wage cut in eight months. On July 16, 1877, the trainmen of Martinsburg, West Virginia, refused to work. They occupied the rail yards and drove out the police. Local townspeople backed the strikers and came to their defense. The militia tried to run the trains, but the strikers derailed them and guarded the switches with guns. They halted all freight movement, but continued moving mail and passengers, to successfully maintain public support. When militia reinforcements were sent in, most mutinied or refused to fight. Many were former or current rail workers. 70 freight engines and 600 freight cars were soon out of service in the Martinsburg yard, as all divisions of B&O workers walked off the job. The Governor sent in a militia from Wheeling, but they also joined the strike.
The Strike Wave Spreads Along the Rail Lines
News of the Martinsburg victory quickly spread, inspiring other strikes along the B&O. But most of the unions took no action. Some were so heavily infiltrated by spies and Pinkertons that the bosses easily thwarted any actions they did take. Consequently, the strikes were almost entirely spontaneous wildcat actions. And the uprisings quickly spread from New York to Louisiana, and from Baltimore to the west coast. The majority of protests were directed against the bosses and the authorities. But in San Francisco, they turned into an anti-Asian riot.
In the Keyser-Piedmont region of West Virginia, black and white coal miners united to halt a train guarded by fifty U.S. soldiers. They posted a handbill that said: “Let the clashing of arms be heard. In the defense of our families, we shall conquer or we shall die.” In Baltimore, soldiers shot and killed between ten and twenty-two strikers.
Violence in Pennsylvania
In Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a National Guard company mutinied. In Altoona, strikers surrounded the troops and sabotaged the engines, forcing the soldiers to surrender. The soldiers then fraternized with the striking workers and marched home to the accompaniment of singers from an African-American militia company. In Harrisburg, the state capital, teenagers made up a large part of the multi-ethnic crowd.
In Pittsburgh, workers struck against the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, the largest corporation in the world. Young boys and men from the mills and factories joined in. Again, the militia refused to attack the workers. Many soldiers joined the strikers. So, the Governor brought in the Philadelphia militia. These were battle-hardened soldiers from the Civil and Indian Wars, with no ties to the Pittsburgh community, and no qualms about shooting civilians. They opened fire on the crowd, killing twenty workers in five minutes. The crowd retreated, but returned with their own militia. They burned the rail yards to the ground, holding off firefighters at gunpoint. The Philadelphia militia hid in the roundhouse, but the fire forced them to flee. The workers and police fired on them as they ran. In nearby Allegheny, strikers looted the armory. They dug trenches, took over the telegraph and railroad, and controlled all economic and political functions.
The South
Black longshoremen initiated a strike in Galveston, Texas, demanding a raise to $2.00 per day. Not only were they victorious, but they inspired white workers to join them. In Louisville, Kentucky, black sewer workers initiated a strike wave that quickly included coopers, textile workers, brick makers, cabinet workers and factory workers. Black workers in many parts of the south demanded equal pay to whites.
Chicago
In Chicago, the Workingmen’s Party (affiliated with the First International, in Europe), organized a rally of six thousand people. At this gathering, a former Confederate Army Officer from Waco, Texas, named Albert Parsons, gave a fiery speech. Parsons was radicalized by the events of the Great Upheaval. In the years following it, he became one of the nation’s leading anarchist organizers. He was executed in 1887 as one of the Haymarket Martyrs who had been fighting for the eight-hour workday. His widow, Lucy Parsons, an African American woman, went on to cofound the radical Industrial Workers of the World, in 1905, along with Mother Jones, Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and others.
The next day, a crowd of young people began moving through the railroad yards, closing down the freights. They went to the factories and stockyards and called out the workers. They shut down the brickyards and lumberyards. That same day, Albert Parsons was fired from his job with the Chicago Times and declared blacklisted.
As in other big cities, the police attacked the protestors in Chicago. One journalist wrote, “The sound of clubs falling on skulls was sickening for the first minute, until one grew accustomed to it. A rioter dropped at every whack, it seemed, for the ground was covered with them.” Police fired into the protest, killing three men. The next day, an armed crowd of 5,000 fought the police, who fired again, killing several more. During the Battle of the Viaduct (July 25, 1877), the police slaughtered thirty workers and injured over one hundred.
The Saint Louis Commune
The most well-organized and lasting uprising of the Great Upheaval occurred in Saint Louis. For nearly a week, workers controlled all functions of society. It was the only town besides Chicago where the actions were predominantly organized by socialists, led by the Workingmen’s Party. The party was organized in four sections, by nationality, to facilitate communication across different languages. Strikers included skilled and unskilled workers. Black and white workers united, even though the unions were all segregated. At one rally, a black steamboat worker asked the crowd if they would stand behind the levee workers, regardless of race. “We will!” they shouted back. Another speaker said, “The people are rising up in their might and declaring they will no longer submit to being oppressed by unproductive capital.”
Women played a prominent role in St. Louis, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the men. According to one news account: “Women with babes in arms joined the enraged female rioters. The streets were fluttering with calico of all shades and shapes. Hundreds were bareheaded, their disheveled locks streaming in the wind. Many were shoeless. Some were young, scarcely women in age, and not at all in appearances. Dresses were tucked up around the waist, revealing large underthings. Open busts were common as a barber’s chair. Brawny, sunburnt arms brandished clubs. Knotty hands held rocks and sticks and wooden blocks. Female yells, shrill as a curfew’s cry, filled the air.” The police clubbed and brutalized the women with the same enthusiasm they used on the men.
The First Uprising Against the Oligarchy
Karl Marx enthusiastically followed events during the Great Strike. He called it “the first uprising against the oligarchy of capital since the Civil War.” He predicted that it would inevitably be suppressed, but might still “be the point of origin for the creation of a serious workers’ party in the United States.”
Ironically, many of the Saint Louis activists were followers of Ferdinand Lasalle, whom Marx detested. And some, like Albert Currlin, a Workingmen’s Party leader in Saint Louis, were outright racists, who mistrusted the black strikers and refused to work with them, contributing to the ultimate failure of the commune.
Labor’s Downfall
Despite the many small victories, the upheaval ended by early August. No social revolution occurred and labor ultimately lost. Federal troops and militias had slaughtered 100 workers and imprisoned thousands more. Most workers did not get a pay raise. And in the aftermath, legislators passed numerous anti-union laws.
However, capital’s victory was not quick, nor easy. 100,000 workers had participated in the strikes. More than half the freight on the nation’s 75,000 miles of track had been halted. The strikers maintained considerable public support. The initial ineffectiveness of the military was due, in part, to the fact that many soldiers had enlisted just to secure a steady income during the depression, only to be forced to work for months without pay. Also, troop levels were relatively small, as many soldiers were still bogged down in battles with the Nez Perce, and with battles against the Indigenous populations of the Rio Grande and New Mexico. Lastly, capitalism itself was relatively young and inexperienced. The bosses weren’t as effective at undermining worker solidarity as they are today. They hadn’t yet mastered how to control public sentiment. But the capitalists did learn a lot from the Great Strike of 1877. In the wake of the uprisings, they constructed many of the old stone armories we see across the country today, in order to provide greater fire power for the next strike wave.
About The Great Upheaval Trilogy
About ten years ago, I set out to write an epic novel about these events. Cleary, there was plenty of excitement for a great work of historical fiction, but far too much for a single novel. So, I decided to write a series, the Great Upheaval Trilogy. And as I did the research, I discovered that just weeks before the Great Upheaval began, twenty innocent Irish miners were hanged in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania—ten in a single day. It was the second largest mass execution in U.S. history. They were convicted of murder, accused of being terrorists from a secret organization called the Molly Maguires. Dozens were imprisoned. All were union activists. Some held public office, as sheriffs and school board members. And a few of the accused Mollies escaped and were never heard from again.
This became the basis for the first book in the series, Anywhere But Schuylkill, (published by Historium Press, September, 2023), which follows the life of a teenage coal miner, Mike Doyle, one of the Mollies who got away. I am currently working on the sequel, Red Hot Summer in the Big Smoke, which takes place during the train strike in Pittsburgh, and follows the life of Mike’s kid sister, Tara.
Check out other stops on the tour for additional informative essays by the author:
Thank you very much for hosting Michael Dunn today, with such a fascinating guest post.
Take care,
Cathie xo
The Coffee Pot Book Club