and all
the while the militia guarded property. In July, 1877, the men of the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad refused to submit to a fourth reduction in
wages in seven years and struck. From Baltimore the resentment spread to
Pennsylvania and culminated with riots in Pittsburgh. All the anthracite
coal miners struck, followed by most of the bituminous miners of Ohio,
Indiana, and Illinois. The militia were impotent to subdue the mobs;
Federal troops had to be sent by President Hayes into many of the
States; and a proclamation by the President commanded all citizens to
keep the peace. Thus was Federal authority introduced to bolster up the
administrative weakness of the States, and the first step was taken on
the road to industrial nationalization.

The turmoil had hardly subsided when, in 1880, new strikes broke out.
In the long catalogue of the strikers of that year are found the ribbon
weavers of Philadelphia, Paterson, and New York, the stablemen of New
York, New Jersey, and San Francisco, the cotton yard workers of New
Orleans, the cotton weavers of New England and New York, the stockyard
employees of Chicago and Omaha, the potters of Green Point, Long Island,
the puddlers of Johnstown and Columbia, Pennsylvania, the machinists
of Buffalo, the tailors of New York, and the shoemakers of Indiana. The
year 1881 was scarcely less restive. But 1886 is marked in labor annals
as "the year of the great uprising," when twice as many strikes as in
any previous year were reported by the United States Commissioner of
Labor, and when these strikes reached a tragic climax in the Chicago
Haymarket riots.

It was during this feverish epoch that organized labor first entered the
arena of national politics. When the policy as to the national currency
became an issue, the lure of cheap money drew labor into an alliance in
1880 with the Greenbackers, whose mad cry added to the general unrest.
In this, as in other fatuous pursuits, labor was only responding to the
forces and the spirit of the hour. These have been called the years
of amalgamation, but they were also the years of tumult, for, while
amalgamation was achieved, discipline was not. Authority imposed from
within was not sufficient to overcome the decentralizing forces, and
just as big business had yet to learn by self-imposed discipline how
to overcome the extremely individualistic tendencies which resulted in
trade anarchy, so labor had yet to learn through discipline the
les