page_title: Franklin B. Gowen
section_title: Great Strike of 1877
hierarchical_section_title: Franklin B. Gowen / Running the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad / Great Strike of 1877
caption_attribution_description: en:Uriah Smith Stephens (1821 - 1882) was a U.S. labor leader. He led nine Philadelphia garment workers to found the Knights of Labor in 1869, a more successful early national union.
context_page_description: Franklin Benjamin Gowen served as president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad in the 1870s/80s. He is identified with the undercover infiltration and subsequent court prosecutions of Molly Maguires, mine workers, saloonkeepers and low-level local political figures arraigned and tried for multiple acts of violence, including murders and attempted murders of coal mine operators, foremen and workers, and peace officers.
  Other aspects of Gowen's presidency that merit consideration include:
  Despite the Reading Railroad being legally prohibited by its corporate charter from owning or operating coal mines, under Gowen's leadership the railroad obtained 142 square miles of coal lands and illegally ran numerous mining operations upon them, but the state of Pennsylvania deemed the prohibition to be unenforceable.
  He was a central figure in negotiating both the first written labor agreement between mine workers and operators in the U.S., and the first industry-wide price-fixing agreement in the U.S.
  He played a signal role in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, including the Reading Railroad Massacre.
  Under his leadership the Reading Railroad twice fell into bankruptcy.
context_section_description: During Franklin Gowen's presidency, the Reading Railroad was one of the richest corporations in the world—running not only trains, but an empire of coal mines, of canals and oceangoing vessels; and even trying (unsuccessfully) a subsidiary rail venture in Brazil. Though its corporate management resided in Philadelphia, the motive power propelling the railroad emanated from Reading, roughly 60 miles (97 km) northwest of the larger city, where a 36-acre (150,000 m²) engineering/production shop complex sat adjacent to the downtown. Disputes between the Reading and laborers embroiled not only miners in the Coal & Iron division, but engineers and other workers in the Railroad division as well. Both the Reading Railroad and its namesake city were fertile grounds for early unionization. In particular, the city of Reading was throughout the 1870s home to a very motivated local of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (the BLE). Gowen's crushing of the WBA, coupled with his widely hailed unraveling of the Mollie Maguires, heartened railroad capitalists nationwide. His triumphs refreshed their confidence that unionism could be squashed altogether. This impression of Gowen's prowess against unions was reinforced by his moves to quell a BLE strike in Reading in April 1877. Having learned from spies of a strike about to happen, Gowen issued an ultimatum: leave the union, or be fired. Nearly 80 per cent of the railroad's engineers walked off the job. Bosses and other non-union employees were pressed into service to run the trains until "temporary" replacements (i.e., strikebreakers) could be hired on. The New York Times hailed the destruction of the "dictatorial" BLE and encouraged "employers generally" to imitate Gowen's anti-union stance.
  Throughout the spring of 1877, heads of the four major U.S. trunk lines — the B&O, the New York Central, the Erie and the Pennsylvania — held meetings to determine how, by working together, they could all "earn more and … spend less". The initial fruits of these meetings was a freight pooling arrangement along lines similar to Gowen's anthracite combination, to increase revenues by reducing competition. They also determined that, after Gowen's defeating the BLE, a reduction in rail workers' wages was timely. The Pennsylvania was the first of the four to act, announcing an across-the-board wage cut of 10 per cent, effective June 1, 1877. Cuts on other roads — not just the four trunk lines — followed, affecting rail workers nationwide. The B&O's 10 per cent cut precipitated, in July 1877, a work stoppage in Martinsburg, West Virginia, which multiplied with telegraphic speed into the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. The Great Strike flashed from coast to coast; workers on railroad after railroad, in city after city, struck as well, forcing a halt to all rail activity in or through numerous locales, and in some places triggering general non-railroad work stoppages. Interstate commerce was paralyzed for weeks. As the Strike spread, destructive and deadly violence erupted in some major cities — Baltimore; Pittsburgh, Reading and Scranton, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, Chicago, and San Francisco. Almost immediately upon his return from Europe, on the very day the Great Strike broke out, Gowen instituted massive layoffs of brakemen across the railroad, in effect both sanctioning and reinforcing the other railroads' moves while he was gone. In Reading, back in April and May, striking BLE engineers had been quickly displaced by strikebreakers and then blacklisted—but the strikebreakers, as well as other workers, were not paid by the cash-strapped Reading Railroad from May through mid-July. While the Great Strike gathered momentum, Gowen found the money to pay back wages in Reading. Local outrage at Gowen and the Reading was intensified as newly laid-off brakemen swelled the ranks of unemployed railroad men and strikebreakers saw their wages as a transparent effort to buy loyalty.
  Ultimately, within a month of the first Mollie Maguire hangings (June 20, 1877), the ongoing BLE strike in Reading, which Gowen believed 
caption: Uriah S. Stephens, founder of the Knights of Labor