The Scranton Massacre and the Great Railroad Strike
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
In the summer of eighteen seventy-seven, Scranton went to war with itself. What started on the railroads spread through the entire industrial workforce of the city, and it ended in gunfire on the streets.
The Great Railroad Strike of eighteen seventy-seven was the first major nationwide labor uprising in American history. Triggered by wage cuts on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the unrest spread city by city across the country. In Scranton, it arrived on July twenty-third, when railroad workers walked off the job. Within days, coal miners, iron workers, silk mill laborers, and workers from a dozen other industries joined them. Thousands of people stopped work at once.
The city's industrialists responded by forming a posse. At its head was William Walker Scranton, general manager of the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company and a member of the founding family the city was named for. The posse was armed with new rifles. On August first, eighteen seventy-seven, the armed posse confronted a crowd of strikers and rioters. They opened fire. Four people were killed or fatally wounded. Estimates of those injured ranged from twenty to fifty. Governor Hartranft declared martial law over Scranton. State and federal troops occupied the streets, armed with Gatling guns.
Note: the exact number of dead is documented, but some source accounts differ on the precise total of wounded; the figures cited here come from the most cited historical record.
The posse leader and about twenty of his men were later charged with assault and murder. Every one of them was acquitted. The strikers returned to work in October having won nothing. The owners had learned that armed force worked. The workers had learned that they were on their own.
The legacy of that summer did not vanish, though. Within a year, Scranton's workers organized politically and elected a new mayor, a labor man named Terence Powderly, who would go on to lead a union that for a brief time enrolled nearly one million members across the country.
